


runaway trains

by saturmime



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: 90's AU, Alternate Universe - High School, Domestic Violence, F/F, Homophobia, Occasional slurs, Polyamory, Teacher-Student Relationship, Trans Character, actually scratch that there wont be any smut thats gross, in fact if you need me to warn you before hand of anything else please just leave a comment !, lots of smoking, low-key anarchist trash suyin beifong, sexual content that i will warn you about right before the scene !
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-05-17 12:06:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 10
Words: 62,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5868781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saturmime/pseuds/saturmime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>learning to talk to people! and learning to find help. and how sometimes the best place to do that is in someone just as off the rails as you. </p><p>disclaimer: i do not condone pedophilia. this story will not condone pedophilia. thank.</p><p>new chapter: like august idk im sure neither of you mind<br/> </p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prelude

Sometimes, I don’t know where I am.

Well, not really like that. I know where I am, know the streets, the people who live on them, the directions you take to get to here or there. I know the way to my own house with my eyes closed, the cracks in the sidewalk that I fell over and scraped up my hands on when I _actually tried_ to find my way with my eyes closed. I know it all, Jesus, I’ve lived with it my entire life, how could I not?

Sometimes I don’t know where I am, as if I fluctuate constantly between a state of two seperate fantasies. As if my entire existence is one long train ride, in which I’ll sometimes look out the window to find I head in a different direction than the one I set out in. As if I am never quite sure where I’m going, even though the terrain is familiar and every glance around me is redolent of a lifetime I’ve spent immersed in the same surroundings.

One one side, I know what I’ll find, and it can be simply described as heaven. A safe haven of perfection, clean air, and just retribution. Somewhere where everyone who should be happy, is, and those who shouldn’t, they are merely trampled into the gaps in the concrete--until nothing remains of them but the shadow of a bad dream on the mind. It’s what I feel I want, what I aspire towards. It is my final destination. And while I subconsciously may know exactly how unrealistic a prospect that this is, it no longer phases me. If I get there, I can be content with my life, and if I don’t, I will spent the rest of my life trying. It’s more of something to work towards than something I actually feel I will accomplish.

 

I assume, if given divine power, that I’d make it myself. Twist the stark reality of living, give certain people a little push in a different direction. Make things better. Be the God that never existed, the one that could twist and turn humans from their self-carved paths, like using a stick to drive ants mingling on the side of the curb.

Yeah, I would. I would change...a ton of things.

That guy down the street who shot up the 711 a few blocks over, last month? I would be the one to make him stay home, decide not to have so much to drink, maybe discover how little he values his own life over the 4 teenagers buying cigarettes and energy drinks at 3 in the morning on a Friday.

I guess that’s a bit too much. Maybe he would have been better off with a sudden spiritual epiphany. But it’s okay. The criminals of the world, the violent, the unjust. They would get their deserved karma. I’d change so many people, save so many lives, I would be worshipped instead of screamed up at, angry and broken.

But at the same time, I want this because I am selfish. I want this because if it were true, I would have the power to fix myself. Fix my life up seamlessly. I would have stopped...things. Time itself, preferably. That would be best. Only for a few minutes. Because when it came down to the one moment that was the difference between wether everything went to shit or took a turn for the better, I had no control.

All I ever needed was a few minutes. I actually believe I managed myself quite well, up until this point, without the help of any God. Well, I did most of it.

Just a few, just enough to do _one thing_. One very important thing that I thought I could manage, that I thought would be okay and that was okay, in that moment, but only…

Only if everything else held off.

Was that too much to ask for? Was _she_ too much to ask for? Only a slight incentive for the shitpile I’ve put up with for the last 17 years of my life, and it just couldn’t happen?

 

You must think I’m just a dramatic mess, and nothing more. I am. Oh, I am. But when you reach the point in your life when you absolutely peak, when you are exploding with an unremitting, chemical mess of emotion you hardly recognize, that you thought you lost long ago, you just want to hold on. And in the long run, holding on is what you need to do. Holding on is all you _can_ do. Because if you aren’t holding on, you’re...

You don’t want to fall. You never want to fall, you want to feel someone under your skin, someone’s lips against yours, you want mad, ambient emotion. Boundless feeling that you still can’t quite explain, millions, and millions of shockwaves pulsating through your skin, one after another. Your shoes scuff against one another on the tarmac, moving closer, only tightening your grip on the world, steering you in the right direction once again.. And you know there’s no drug in the world that could do this, no substance that is capable of reaching out, shakily finding a hold on your own wavering form, and melting the two of you together, like two puffs of smoke twisting upward and into each other, through a starless, black sky.

And on the other side, there is nothing, and everything at the same time. A state of silent turmoil, where nothing exists but this emotion, pressing down on every side of you, a wreck. Everything you have felt inside come to life, and instead of clawing you up from the inside, comes out to play in the outside. Anger, joy, pain, carelessness, depression, ecstasy, as well as a mélange of simply indescribable emotion thrown in the mix. And at the end of the track: God only knows. Submission. The Void. Happiness in it’s purest state. Who knows.

 

And then sometimes I feel like I’m strapped to the front of the train instead, more often than not during the times I know I head towards the other side. I just wait then, either until we reach our destination or another train slams into me head on. There is nothing else that I can do, except wait for when I wake up one morning in the safety of my own bed and find I am back where I think I should be.

 

I wake up like this one morning, years ago, and I feel okay. The sunlight shines directly in my face, filtering precisely through the broken slat of my window like a laser pointer, and hitting me in a little odd triangle directly on my forehead.

I turn over, facing my back to the glare, and blink slowly as the sun spots fade from my vision. Everything’s okay. I feel empty, light, as if I’ve been supercharged by the sunlight, swept completely clean from the inside out. The sound of a bottle smashing comes from below me, muffled through the floor, and someone starts to yell distantly. Everything is clean, pure, and, in a way, full. All the pieces seem exactly in place, as if all the planets have aligned. Taking deep breaths, I let my eyes close again, and float back off into limbo.

I decide to stay in bed and enjoy it while it lasts.


	2. here she comes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avu__4TjB94

I don’t know exactly what it is about the concept of school that completely _fucks me up_ , but it does. Even with the side of it that I actually like. Getting out of the house. God, that’s amazing, free, like the first step you might take outside after a long plane ride. 

But otherwise, when I finally realize I have fifteen minutes before I might as well give up on any hope of receiving an education, the idea of leaving my bed is nearly incomprehensible. But I do it. I do me, the ever-perseverant, poster child of dedication, especially when it comes to shit that matters, like school.

The stairs seem too heavy as I come down, an extra layer of gravity pushing me down on them with each step I take. 

He’s down there. 

I turn the corner and see him, half-leaned up against the countertop, head back against a cabinet. There’s a fresh bottle in his hand, even though a glance shows a shattered one sprayed across the linoleum not ten feet away.

I don’t want to say anything, can’t think of anything to say, so I don’t. I try to go directly past, through the door, out, down the steps, into the street, until I reach somewhere I want to be. I try not to give him a chance.

“I’ll drive you. I’m sober this time, I swear.” He sets the bottle to the side, it’s full. I can already feel the words coming out.

“I can walk.”

“You’ll be late if you walk. Come on, It doesn’t bother me.”

“ _I can walk_.”

See, it’s not at all that I don’t place any _trust_ in his sobriety, because it’s easy enough to tell, that the bottle that smashed on the floor was leftover from last night, that the new one was simply that, new. It was easy to tell that this time, he told the truth.

I still want to go. I leave the house, across the yard, into the street. I don’t know where, I want to keep going, going, into somewhere, somewhere open. Somewhere that I can breathe, somewhere that’s free. Somewhere that I can see around me, that’s completely open to my eyes. 

Clarity is something I place high value on, and when I can’t find it, nothing ever seems right, until I do. And I need to find it. I need to find it so I can breathe easier, so I can understand where I’m going. What I’m doing. I need it so I can understand why I get twisted up inside when I look at people I don’t even know, and so i can know why I hate people I do. I need to figure out why I cut myself off from my family, why I love the feeling of falling, why I can’t breathe sometimes. It seems like everything is just a question of why, why am I going here, why am I doing this, why does this keep happening? 

Why is my other direction. Why is my emotional state. Why is me putting out an effort to get in my first direction, but every mile it seems I run, I end up falling back two.

 

I never could ditch school. Not only for fear of the repercussions within my own home post-ditch, but for the simple idea that I wouldn’t know where to go. I have a terrible sense of direction, anyways. And, well…there’s something secure about routine, gets your mind off things, I guess. Even if your schedule is shit. Not much to look forward to..requirements, etcetera…

 

An hour later and I’m walking a blind path down the crowded hallway, scoping out the directions to my classes with what I assume may come across as the look of someone checking out a hit list, when something hits the crown of my head and bounces off into the crowd in front of me. Slipping my schedule into my back pocket, I turn, ignoring the dirty looks thrown by the congregation for holding up the stream, and crane my head for the source of the phenomenal shot.

Of course, I’m still searching futilely when a pair of hands clamp down on my shoulders, firm, gentle. I feel like they know me, know me enough to use both hands, and then someone’s chin rests at the top of my head, steering us off to the side, against a row of lockers; it makes me feel like a child, I don’t know.

“Hey.”

“Quick, give me your classes.”

It’s nice, I guess, to know someone. Nice to have someone so anxious to get a class with you they hunt you down in the hallways, pull you out, demand answers. Makes me feel valued, needed, and it hardly dampens that feeling when his mouth turns down at the corners. His large black eyes skim all over the paper, getting a weird look in them for about a second, then he hands it back, slowly.

“Nope.”

“Not one?”

Max shakes his head, and we keep walking. More like he walks, and I use him as a human shield because he’s tall and friends like that, they come with a few perks.

“So,” We turn out of the hallway, down a clearer path, and I breathe freely once again. “I couldn’t help noticing you’re trying _aerial_ again.” His emphasis on _aerial_ is hardly derogatory, but I guess how anyone who didn’t really know what it meant would say it. Hell, _I_ didn’t even know what it meant at first. 

“Worked out well enough last year.” It’s a lie. I joined it because it seemed like a copout, but a copout that you wouldn’t necessarily think of _as_ one. It was hell. The teacher was hell. My _life_ \--

You get it. I fucked up, joining it, but for some reason, choosing my classe that following year, my hand naturally gravitated towards the little box. And the year after that. And the year after that, like a bad habit I knew wasn’t right but just seemed so much so at the time.

 

“I’ve heard, ah, from Mel. I guess they kicked the old guy out.”

“You’re kidding. Catch him checking out the freshmen, or what? I always thought his eyes wandered a bit too much.”

“No idea. There’s some new…” He trails off here, and when I look up, I can tell he’s gone. Zoned off into some distant universe. I wish I could join him, honestly. 

“Yeah?”

“I’m not repeating what Mel said, at least.”

“Know anything about her?”

“Other than what I’ve been putting up with on the receiving end of my sister’s rose-tinted tirades? Not at all.”

 

She still gets like this. 

I focus on other things instead, not that. Max, how he holds the straps of his bag in both hands up at his shoulders, his speech pattern, the questions he asks. How was summer, have I been looking for jobs, what I think about the leaves. Desultory conversation topics. Until I realize we’ve stopped, and he’s leaving me again, ducking into an open classroom door. 

I find my schedule again. 

Physics. 

I want to die.

It hits me like an atom bomb in those next few minutes, how undeniably tired I am. I woke up this morning feeling nothing short of unstoppable, and now..the true magnitude of my exhaustion hits me. I consider leaving, in every class that I step into, at the sight of every overly-enthusiastic teacher’s dumb face. I just want to go, to be free, off the rails. No more anxiety-inducing classes, no more fucking Melanie and her disgusting obsessions with one after another unassuming cute girl or whatever it is she’s into stalking now.

Whatever it is, I always end up wanting to slap her over it. I mean, Mel gets like this. I mean since we were twelve and she used to pass notes talking about the cutest girls in the class. Asking me which one I liked better. She never cared, I guess that was one thing I admired her for. Not one bit. I don’t know when she graduated from people her age to the goddamn teachers, but somewhere along the way, it happened. I don’t think she’s ever not had a crush on someone. And they keep getting worse, and worse. 

What can I do, I mean? Stress out over how painful every single class period will be with her incessant comments, or just, well, ignore it? Let it all slide off. Like I’ve been doing for years, ducking under the flow of my entire life, shutting my eyes to the thundering impact of everything around me in order to retain some sense of control. 

I am well-practiced in the art of giving up.

As long as I’m giving up on my feet. As long as I’m heading the right way.

 

I still remember that first moment.

I remember because I get there before everyone else, for some reason that I’m not entirely sure of. God just wanted to put me through a little extra taste of suffering today. 

The room is the same, empty, open. Fills me with the distant scent of sweat and the indescribable rosin-y kind. Various things hanging from the ceiling, silks, a singular acrobatic hoop that nobody ever uses because they’re afraid of climbing up into it. Everything is familiar, like stepping into a childhood home, but with the lingering feeling of the unknown, like someone else has occupied something that you hold so many memories with. It’s that I know everything is different now. Better, maybe. Maybe worse. It all hinges on the only other person in the room, that I eye sideways as I step inside, dropping my bag down at my feet, and taking my good time to lower a jogging heart rate.

She’s just sitting there. Halfway inside the joining little office that sits at the back of the main room, slumped against a swivel chair and pouring over some binder like her life depends on its contents. I look at her, and she looks up, as if she could feel my eyes lingering in her direction. The eraser end of a pencil sits in the crevice above her chin, her eyebrows perfect and raising in my direction. I let the tension roll off, and look around the room instead of returning the glance as more people drift in, filling the open space with chatter and energy that I can blend into. 

I catch Mel’s eye across the crowd, near the front, and she smiles lecherously, poised perfectly with crossed arms, mouth offensively pink in its disconcerting smirk. She stays quiet, at least, as we go through the motions of role calling and whatever else the teacher says, but the next time she catches my glance, she holds up her hands, nine fingers, and her eyes flit back and forth from me to the woman at her right.

“Right...so I’m going to be perfectly honest and say I have _no_ idea what the fuck I’m doing...but that’s okay.” 

She throws her head over her shoulder almost immediately, and I groan internally.

“Happens to the best of us.” 

She gets the most amazing response I can imagine, because it’s none at all. I watch her, the teacher, look up from the role sheet, just look up, her face blank and maybe revealing a little confusion, and then she just moves on. It’s glorious, and I can’t help smiling a bit at the rejection and the expression on Mel’s face as she starts handing out the locker combinations. With a little luck, this might be a sign. Maybe she’ll give up, get the hint, and this won’t be as bad as I initially thought. 

Maybe?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gosh?


	3. oddity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYYRH4apXDo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mostly about habits

I spend too much time around people, when I’m in school. And I don’t mean just the crushing pressure of regular attendance. Cause there’s always something, when you do this thing, always someone to come out of nowhere with a “hey, come to this party”, and “hey, come hang out with us later”, “hey, do you smoke?”. You just don’t get that during summer, when all you do is sit around the house and go on the occasional, enlightened walk. And, the thing is, as much as I hate all of it, I always seem to say yes, just because it’s an easy way out of the house that I hate even more.

It’s mostly her, though. It’s mostly Mel. Mel, who runs on a steady dosage of attention and whatever else she uses to shoot up to her inflated ego. Mel, who has to occupy herself with anything just to keep herself ticking. Who fuels with obsessions and the effort to catch unlikely people’s attention. 

Soon enough, I’m spending more time and her and Max’s house than my own, draped over a couch in their basement as the two of them scream over little italian pixel-men on the screen of their crappy, box T.V. It’s entertaining, for sure, but--

I don’t understand why I always have to be dissatisfied with everything. Sometimes I think I just need to calm down, be happy with what I’ve been given...not only complaining, non-stop.

But I hate it. I just hate it, putting up with the two of them, and sometimes I think they just like to _find_ reasons to argue. I wish that they’d just shut up, realize how well-off they are--as hypocritical as that makes me sound, I admit-- and just let go some of their petty fucking quarrels. But they’re all I have. And it’s not so bad.

“I don’t think you’re meant to smoke here.” I dare to say one afternoon, hanging off the staircase that connects to the side of the school.

She’s taken up smoking only in the past year. Makes her look “sophisticated”, she says.

It makes her look like a bum.

She puffs her smoke right into my face as response, so I turn away, blinking through the film to look back out over the stairway and into the street. A single bird hops out, nosing into the rejected chip bag that lies crumpled on the curb, but finds nothing, and patters off to the side.

Beside me I feel Max standing up, and I turn to watch him aim a perfect throw out in its direction. It breaks when it hits the ground, startling the bird, but when it realizes the danger has passed, comes back to the offering. He does this with all animals. I half expect all of Cinderella’s fucking mice to start trailing after him one of these days.

“Hey, I _bought_ those,” Mel growls, and I can’t hold back the smile that forms as I watch him grow surprised, racking his mind for a retaliation as his eyes begin to shift wildly.

“You gave them to him, asshole. Stop picking fights.”

She looks relieved, and pleasantly surprised at once, she loves getting me involved, and I know it, and I can tell by how her attention is immediately redirected that this gives her a bit of satisfaction. I prepare for a fight.

But her eyes, instead of connecting with mine, focus at a point above my shoulder, and her mouth stretches up into a creepily lopsided smile.

“Speaking of who I’d like to fight…”She says under her breath.

I turn to see the bird carrying it’s bounty up onto the sidewalk, flapping its tiny wings to escape from the car that rolls soundlessly past before returning to its food. Mel cranes her head around me, moving to watch over the bushes as the car turns into the parking lot.

“There’s someone I’d like to get down and fight with…” She purrs, poised like a wild animal as she pokes her head over the hedge. I follow her gaze, I have to, and already feel Max breathing down my neck as he watches from behind. 'Get all physical. Up close and..."

“No.” I hear directly into my ear, and when I look back, he’s already left, both hands raised in surrender and head shaking slowly from side to side. “No. Nope. That’s not cool.” I don’t even bother trying to quiet him down, I can already tell we’re not going to be heard.

He comes back, still, planting a hand on her shoulder in desperation. “Mel for christ’s sake stop looking at her like that.”

She gives him a look, gesturing wildly in the direction of the parking lot, and the slam of a car door makes her bring her head down a bit lower. I can hear strings of a phone conversation, detached phrases I can hardly make out. Then Mel snaps again, and overpowers what I can hear.

“How are you not acknowledging how freaking stunning this one is? I bet there’s not a person on campus who wouldn’t hit that if given the chance--”

“I wouldn’t!” He hisses back, and her jaw drops so low she has to catch her cigarette before it falls from her lips. And then they’re fighting again. But it’s alright.

Everything is alright. Speaking of this new aerial coach, she isn’t a total fucking loser--well, of course, she’s amazing. I mean, she actually knows all the moves, in fact, I’m pretty sure she was born clinging to an aerial silk. Classes under her are efficient and practical, many of us more experienced students working double as demonstrators and spotters for the younger ones, still learning how to climb, all while she flits between us like a small, intimidating hummingbird. 

Maybe not so small. She could probably beat me up. She could probably beat us all up, at once.

She’s pretty much gorgeous, at least, in an unassuming, powerful way. Mel still talks about her, mostly in class, going on about her impressive physique--I admit to that one, I’m pretty sure her level of muscle mass is just about everyone’s life goal-- her accent, anything. 

I call her pretentious once, I remember. Sighing to no one in particular during an exceptionally wild demonstration of some kind of flip she does for a kid, and receive a murmured “I know” from the girl seated behind me on the mat. Then I get the urge to turn around and call her out for agreeing with me, because she’s not even necessarily pretentious. Acts like she’s so much better than every chick and every guy in the room, and she honestly is. It still makes me better to think of her as pretentious. It’s nice to find flaw in someone so outwardly...perfect.

She does seem quite perfect, the more I allow myself to think about it. I take the rest of the class period wondering what lies under that good coat of paint, chipping it away mentally to find... What exactly? And into the next class, deep into lecture, but I get nothing.

Okay, I haven’t talked about her yet. I’m not obligated to

Just because a...lot of this seems like it will be about her...that’s really not the point. It’s mostly about me. Us. Mostly me, and what holds me up during the storm. Which is her. Alright.

It is about her. In fact, I will hardly deny that the entirety of this story, figurative cover to cover, is at least eighty-three percent, completely and irrefutably, about her. It won’t do any good for me to deny that, and it’s not ruining any dramatic plotline by revealing this so early on.

But I’m not about to talk about her, honestly only due to the fact that she doesn’t matter, not to me, just yet. In fact, I hardly know a thing about her except she’s desperate to learn trust and and that she’s fuckin’ ripped. Just a name, a face, nothing more than another passing figure that I have trouble reading and that Mel is desperate to fuck.

You meet people in two different ways, I think. One, where you see them for the first time, before you know what they’re really about. What makes them tick. And then the second time, which is deep, more intimate, where you understand those things.

No, there’s a time, and a place, to do that. It isn’t here, not just yet. It’s the second way, because there’s no use in talking about someone when you hardly have found them the first way. It gives them less meaning, less importance. And there’s some importance.

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . . 

 

There’s been three weeks on school, which is a shit place to be in. Shit, because it’s no longer really the beginning of the year, which means no one is really still in that “new semester, new leaf” mindset, and then all the true stress and frustration starts falling on all sides of you. It probably exceeds finals week in how fucking tiring everything starts to be.

I remember vividly how I’m just doing homework. More precisely, slumped against the desk i’ve wedged into the corner of my room, thinking about failing my history class and the dull ache in my arms when I move them. I remember the light pouring in between the blinds where from where the sun has receded, and lining my page with little bars of shadow that I’m starting to trace with a pencil. I am so undeniably aloof, I have to get up, and do pushups to bring myself back down to earth.

By the time I get back into the rhythm of what I have to accomplish before tomorrow, the sun has gone down, and now I have to light about fifty candles just to see what I’m doing. By this time, the front door has open and closed twice, and now I start to hear distant strings of conversation.

He’s mad. I don’t know why, but I can just tell he is. And very soon it’s nearly impossible to drown out the rising volume of the banter, and I start seriously wondering about how much I could invest in a CD player.

I snap, thirty minutes into the yelling. Snap my pencil lead, too. It’s around the time they start throwing shit, and I’m gone.

I march right the fuck into the living room, and somehow, with the strength only developed through three years of pulling myself up onto silk curtains, tear the bottle he brandishes right out of his hand.

He whips around, already livid, and I yell at him. A lot. I don’t even know what he says. I know the image of my mother standing in the shadows, face blank and arms folded.. Not backing me up. Not even going to try.

“This isn’t your place--”

“--yes it is--”

“--stay out of it, you don’t know what this is about!”

Maybe about the fact that they do this almost every time they’re in the same room. Maybe the fact that there’s always something, something wrong. And I’m tired. And I want to interfere. And I do.

He always pulls the same cards, the “I’m the parent”, the “respect me”, the “you live under my roof”. Once in a while, he even pulls one of the ten commandments out of his ass, which is when I _really_ take a hit. But this time, it’s different. It’s specific. It’s whatever my mom did to make him call her an “ungrateful slut”, and his anger, and my snapped temper.

“You don’t have the slightest idea what this is about,” He growls, face twisted up in disgust.

“I know enough that I can tell you that you need to calm the fuck down!”

I think I know this will happen. I know long before I open my mouth that it’s thin ice that I run onto, still swinging. It shouldn’t be a surprise.

 

But it’s almost impossible to judge where to stop, not until you’ve already fallen through. I fall through. One second it’s only yelling, back and forth and sometimes at the same time, and the next, well. 

I can’t feel my face.

He walks off, to find his runaway wife, no doubt, and doesn’t say another word. The yelling starts up again, and it chokes me. Chokes me up.

I don’t know what to do but stand there, fingers wrapping inattentively around the counter behind me. I feel like a child again, tripping on the stairs and not knowing what the new feeling of pain is. I feel shocked out of place. Confused, Astounded. Vaguely humiliated. 

Whether or not they hear the door, I’m already gone. Can’t bear to sit there any longer, suffocating, claustrophobic. 

Down the stairs without tripping, down the path, down onto the sidewalk. And my mind awakens, like an engine sputtering to life, and climbing, up to distress, enragement, infuriation.

I land on the concrete with both hands, still struggling for breath. I could kill him. I could just fucking kill him--I--

My fist hits the ground hard enough to hurt, and it does, like hell. But not enough.

The sensation isn’t rewarding, even after I’ve smashed my other one into the unremitting concrete. Not like it would feel to hit him, the crack of his nose against my knuckles, the spray of blood. I need the satisfaction of making him hurt, feeling him suffer under my fists, but as I punch the ground a final time with my curled fist, all i get is my own pain.

Crumpled up against the ground, I find myself crying, suddenly, dripping all over the concrete, having a breakdown in the middle of the fucking sidewalk. It’s pathetic, and useless, and--

I don’t want to.

But I do it. Pick myself up off the sidewalk, still trembling and fucking streaming tears, ignore the pulsing feeling spreading over the backs of my hands...

And I walk. Just walk, no real definite reason to it. At first it’s just because I need to calm down, need to do something, always need to do something--but I start to notice my mind is wandering, not fully here, and I let it go, spiraling away like a released balloon.

Maybe it’ll make me forget. Maybe one crack in the sidewalk is the line, the mirror to an all new dimension where everything is fine and nothing goes off the tracks. Maybe at some point i’ll turn around and everything will have faded, nothing but a blur remaining to remind me of what I’ve left behind. A little window, a distant television screen. The endless expanse at my head, to float, directionless, out into for eternity.

Of course I don’t even notice the car that pulls up beside me, or who rolls down their window and leans out, cigarette smoke billowing out into the night air and climbing high into the trees along with the distinct sound of what I immediately recognize as Bowie.

Their call out to me vaguely registers in my mind, and after a few seconds of regaining some ramshackle composure I turn, requesting them to repeat the question.

“I only asked if you knew where you were going. Space cadet.”

It’s her. Of course it’s her. Obviously I could have known with a quick glance at her sleek little exotic car and made a pretty good guess, but it hadn’t been a foremost thought, I guess. I realize I haven’t stopped walking, and the Jaguar prowls along beside me just slow enough for it’s coach to retain a close look at me with an intrigued expression. I decide to fight fire with fire.

“Does anyone really know?”

“Fair point.” Stopping, I turn and we share an unreadable gaze, hers tainted with curiosity until she calls out again. “Do you want a ride, to wherever you end up heading?”

Something inside me groans and insists I keep on walking, refusing me that luxury and pressing that I keep to myself. I myself am giving it the finger, and slip into the passenger seat before it can stop me, suck me out into that great expanse. I close it out this time, that part of me, to tap futiley at the walls of my consciousness.

“Got lost on your way home or something?” It’s a mockery of what she’s probably seen, but it doesn’t feel that way, it feels natural. It feels like something you might say to someone who you know well, that you’ve become close enough to joke with. Not a jab at my half-aware state of being.

“Not really.” In a metaphorical sense, sure. But it isn’t the time for metaphors. It’s _never_ the time for metaphors, but still.

“Wellll--” She drags it out, then with a deep drag from her cigarette, obviously thinking over her options before pressing back on the gas and turning us down onto a different street. “You want to go for a drive? I’ll take you back whenever you feel like you should start heading that way. Promise.”

“If you can put up with me.” God, why is she being so nice? We barely even know each other-- she’s my teacher, for Christ’s sake. And I’m no star student, either. But I want that, I so desperately want that, for a reason I don’t fully comprehend myself. For the first time, the most amazing thing in the entire world it seems is to huddle in the passenger seat of my coach’s fancy car, warm autumn breeze teasing my hair as I watch her tap through the bridge of Space Oddity. Of all things.

“You’re looking at me.” I know. I know that I do, even though nothing in her tone is suggesting that I should stop immediately. I suppose that is why her words don’t entice even the least bit of guilt within me. It practically feels, in fact, more like a question. A casual inquiry, not seeming unlike one comment concerning the weather, or the state of the stock market. Not that it should seem as any more, I guess.

“I just never imagined you to be the smoking type.”

She glances down now, at the lit cigarette still slotted between her fingers, almost as if she’s forgotten it. She wears an expression of realization now, calm astonishment almost, as if come out of a daze, then looks back up, raising it to her lips once again as if nothing.

“Well, we all have our secrets.”

I think about that for longer than I imagine. It’s true, I guess. At least it seems like something that would be true. Under the surface, however, it comes to me that I hardly believe it. There must be some people..at least a few out there who simply haven’t the need. As fucked up as everything here is, there must still be some good...If that’s to say keeping a secret or two is, well, bad.

Who knows.

She starts with the silent hesitance of someone still not quite sure whether or not they should begin a story, if it came down to the time, or possibly the simple interest of the person listening. I believe I’m interested. All the signs within me do seem to point that way.

“I...I haven’t actually. In a while, at least.” She pauses, pressing her lips together. “I’m not like, an addict, or anything. But I didn’t always have it under control.”

I still find myself thinking about it as I listen to her, recounting it, how tough her life was, how she couldn’t do it on her own--how the only way she ended up doing it was out of guilt, for when she hypothetically got cancer and ruined the lives of her entire family. How she didn’t care. How her husband cared, and made her care. 

She feels terrible about it, and she tells me. She’s letting him down, and it hurts, but it’s not that big of a deal anyways. She keeps a schedule, a routine of hidden cigarette breaks, a pack in every two weeks, just to feel better. There’s no harm in that.

“We all need things,” she says casually, “To cling on to. Not my fault some of them happen to be minimally cancerous.”

“It’s habitual. Humans naturally rely on their habits.” I repeat, dronelike, before I have time to check myself. It’s old, from an old lecture I hardly listened to, but I remember that part. Always remembered that part. It surprises me when she responds, enthusiastically.

“Precisely. They don’t like change, and when things do start to stray from what they are used to, they seem to run to the only things they know are certain.”

“--that provide release via feelings of security and assurance.”

“My little fucking philosopher.” She says, quieter, half to herself, then adds, louder. 

“Also smoking is really fun. Don’t try it, though.”

“Of course.”

“Kuvira, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t judge me, I suddenly have like, thirty teenagers I have to remember the names of. I’m still a little fuzzy.”

“I get that.” Her smile twitches up again in silent acknowledgement. I decide I like it, it’s faint, subtle. She continues.

“It’s nice. Do you know what it means?”

“I’ve never thought about it.” Suddenly, I am, though. I don’t know why my parents named me this. It’s definitely not a family name, at least. “Thanks, I mean.”

“I don’t know what my name means either, it’s alright.” She smiles again. It still feels strange. There’s a stretch of time that feels almost imagined, like I’ve slowed it down. And then she starts again. As if she knows that it crosses my mind, that I’ve never--

“It’s Suyin. You can call me Su, I actually really despise people addressing me by my last name.”

“How come?”

“Makes me feel official. My worst nightmare.” She adds, quieter, with a hint of disgust. “makes me feel like I’m turning into my sister.”

Her cigarette burns out soon after that, and she pulls another out of the console between us, dropping the old one into a little crystal ashtray balanced inside.

She doesn’t hold the cigarette away, like Mel, or my father. People always seem to hold it away, don’t want the smoke curling all up in their face. But as I watch her, I see that she doesn’t. She holds it close, like it’s important to her, and lets it whisp upwards, around her face and through the sliver of window left unrolled. It looks whimsical, dreamlike, making her appear like a shifty apparition to my gaze. It makes me feel like I’m asleep.

 

We drive around like this for a while, it seems, going nowhere, even though we go a lot of places. Everything seems hazy and surreal, but I still feel weird, almost hyper-aware. On the way past a deserted parking lot, she slows down, then stops, in the middle of the street, and rolls down the window to point out something in a bush.

It takes me too long before I see them, all curled up together in the brush on the curb. Three, no four cats, all black. So quiet. Like they don’t even know what goes on around them, or they have gotten so used to it it no longer bothers them. So used to everything. She says they’ve been there for a while, lived under that bush since before she can remember. 

“They like it there?”

“I think they do. No one ever tries to move them, or chase them off.” She laughs silently, almost not at all, mixed in with her words like color. “I fucked up once, I drove by here with my...my son and he saw them, wanted to go see them. I let him, and I didn’t realize until days later that he hid one of the kittens in his jacket, was hiding it in his room, sneaking food up to it every day. I don’t know _how_ he pulled it off, but I couldn’t get him to take it back, so I just let them stay together. I think they love each other.”

 

I laugh, so she smiles again.

 

“Should I ask for the story here?” _Here_ is accentuated with a vague glance that runs the length of my body, a pair of perfect eyebrows arching high on her forehead. 

I’m still gaping as she blinks, expression falling into one with more serious undertones. I stare at her outstretched hand for a few solid seconds without even realizing, a bit unsure, a bit something that might be fear, but isn’t really. 

So I let my own hand come up, carefully settling into hers, which is soft, surprisingly cool. She grips my fingers firmly as she pulls it in front of her face, but still soft. For some reason I can’t tear my mind away from how soft she holds me, and that fucks me up.

It’s also then I realize that, in the grainy light of the car, I screwed my hands up _bad_. There’s blood, yes, quite a lot of it all crusted around each of my knuckles, which are raw, still tingling even after so much time. Cringing, I try to keep a straight face as she examines the scrapes, wiping away a small trickle of blood that hasn’t dried just yet. Sitting in embarrassed silence as my fuck-up is subjected to her scrutiny.

“The other one?”

“About the same.” I could lie. I could lie just to get out of this conversation, but I don’t see the use. I wouldn’t put it past her to be able to tell if I did, anyways. So I just shrug, and try not to notice the concern as her eyebrows cinch down, almost a bit of pain there, probably my imagination. She releases my hand, and I slip it back into my pocket as fast as possible, I don’t know why.

“You’re going to go home and clean those, alright?” 

There it is. Concern. And it almost throws me off in how...genuine it is. Like she cares, really does. I don’t know, something in her voice. At least it makes me feel like she not only says it because my hands being screwed up may compromise my skill in class.

“And when I say clean, I mean, _clean them_. Make sure they don’t get infected, you know.”

“I know.”

 

 

The next few weeks are, in simplest terms, fucking terrible. And not because I don’t follow through with my instruction to clean all the concrete out of my hands, because I certainly do, even though I can’t find a bandage in my entire house, and in lieu of going out to actually buy a few, I find it easier to scrape out the contents of a drawer, a few, forgotten band aids, underneath the used cans of hairspray and not-quite-finished toothpastes. One even has the fucking ninja turtles on it.

I end up plastering them over the torn parts of my knuckles any way they will fit, It’s a work of art, to say the least The rest of them I leave in the back pocket of my jeans, to swap out later. It still strikes me, as I’m securing the complex in place with a layer of masking tape, how far off I’ve been thrown. it’s not that I necessarily had to do all this, for her, for someone I barely know. But then it just comes back, like a little moth or something that knocks against my ribs as a quiet reminder. 

It’s the image of the second step I took onto the path, on my way back in. Just that one step, none of the others. I’m looking down at them when it happens, of course. Just to be sure i don’t trip, and then it comes back. The music.

I turn, and she’s still there. Still. Leaning out, still with the cigarette, gesturing pointedly in my direction with it. Says something about talking later, about it being fun.

And then she leaves, and it may have just been a dream after all. And I watch headlights cast a jagged, traveling shadow of me on the steps.

The little moth keeps knocking, calling out...

 

No, It’s terrible because now, I avoid her. Now, I can’t stand the thought of having to face her again, after she saw me...like that. Fragile, hurt. I can’t. It’s a habit, me pushing people away.

I know it’s childish. I know it’s stupid, but I can’t handle it. So I don’t. But I do pay more attention to her. It’s hardly a conscious decision, at first, but I realize soon enough how I start to gather things, in class. seeing her pull up to the school in her gorgeous jaguar. The dark waves of her hair, little details in the eyes, the way she laughs. Comparing the her I see here to the one back that night. Convincing myself it was real. Convincing myself that the way she smiles at the freshmen finally executing their first, flawless move the same way she smiled at me when she left me on the second step of my walkway.

i try to pick her apart. I try, and fail, for months, because no matter how hard I try, she won’t even break at the skin.

I do this more than you may think. I know what exactly lies within a lot of people, in fact. I’ve spent years, picking at the seams of people in my life, and the insight I get is astounding. My mother, for example, is a lost, confused child under all that makeup. The few people I dare to call friends, like Mel, are less complicated, and what makes them function is a heavy amount of attention, and nothing more.

My father? Nothing at all. No idea.

I don’t know what it is to me, that I don’t know the inner soul of my fucking aerial coach-- that I spent an hour with _one_ night. Just the curiosity that’s plagued me for years, I guess. But that’s okay, even though I don’t find out about her, for a while.

But then, I fuck it up. I stay too long after class, am still coming down off one of the silks I’ve climbed up into, and before I can dip out, run away from the only person who might give a shit, I already hear it.

A single gunshot, and I’m down.

“Kuvira, hey, can I talk to you?”

 

I take my time, work my locker combination slowly, count the steps up to her office, check the time. Trace the doorknob in silence. 

 

“What did I do?”

She laughs sharply, but quietly, spinning to face me. She reminds me very much of some kind of prestigious mob boss about to order a henchman to nail me in the back of the head.

“Oh, you didn’t do anything wrong.” And it changes, suddenly, she changes. Shifts straight into a completely new character, something undeniably akin to her that night. Her eyes seem more intent, her tone a little higher, a little quieter. Almost secretive. She pulls closer, and I suddenly am very much certain I would like to blow away in some phantom wind.

“Why have you been avoiding me?” Her finger wraps itself in the thin chain she seems to always be wearing around her neck, curling up over and again, until running out, and uncoiling again, letting it fall back so that the single charm slips down in the space between her collarbones.

Folding my arms defensively, I kind of just stand there, sticking my hands into my sleeves as she stares over at me. I open my mouth to say...something...I don’t know exactly what...but she cuts me off before I can, reaching into a drawer to her right and coming up with a single, tri-folded slip of what looks to be notebook paper, edges cleanly cut, folded perfectly. Something turns in my stomach when I notice how many words show through from the other side. It seems official. Official things concern me. Her and me both.

Accepting it cautiously, I try to avoid brushing hands, a pointless effort when her other hand gently clamps down over the heavy layer of band aids covering my knuckles. Cutting off my escape.

“Look at me.”

Her eyes fixate on me the second I do look up, holding me suddenly and strongly, by some ungodly possession, ensnaring me in bright green irises until I’m simply a mess. She retains the lofty, silent tone when she speaks again, still holding me down like a steel trap. Not that I think I mind as much anymore.

“I want you to know...you can talk to me. It’s pretty obvious that you don’t like the idea of that and that’s _fine_ if that’s what you want, but if you ever change your mind.”

“Okay.”

“Kuvira I have no idea what’s going on, and you don’t _have_ to tell me, but if you want to--” She stops, nods down at the letter still in my hand. “Well, just read it. I care about you, well, I’m trying to make an effort, and you can call whenever you want. Middle of the night, I don’t care.”

“O-okay.”

It’s like a light switch turning on when I say that, her entire normal _aura_ seeming to flicker into existence, and she releases my hand with a light squeeze.

“Now go to class.”

 

 

I slide my hand into my pocket, and the sharp edge of paper pricks my fingertip. I forced it out of my mind the entire day, refused to even think about it, but always felt it, like a weight hanging there in my pocket, the secrets to the universe held within. Yeah. There’s that. What confuses me here, is that I don’t know what to do with it. Clenching it between my fingers, I slip it out, unfold it, smooth out the creases, leaving a slight smudge where my finger runs over the graphite. The handwriting is scratchy, just legible enough for me to make out if I look closely.

For some reason, I don’t even think that I want it. I should. After that conversation, all those nights ago, I should jump at the prospect of her still wanting to talk to me, to have even more to say to me. I remember how it filled me with warmth, comfort, a feeling I desperately needed even if I didn’t know it outright. But I don’t. There is no explanation. I don’t want to read it.

Soon enough I realize that I’ve just been standing there, in the center of my room, holding a piece of paper I’m not even planning on reading; And then I go downstairs, drink the milk straight from the carton because there’s no car in the driveway just yet, and pretend to ignore the light footfalls of my mother on the stairs.

I pretend to not notice, fasten the plastic cap on tight, slide the carton back on the empty rack. Pretend to not hear her shaky sigh, the way she folds her arms tight around her from out of the corner of my eye.

“Honey, I’m so sorry.”

She comes over, wraps her arms around me stiffly. I don’t reciprocate, even though it feels as if I should. It’s _habitual_.

Her words stick in my throat like syrup, saccharine and so overdone in sweetness it makes me want to gag. And then she touches my cheek, where he had hit me, and strokes all the way down to my chin, as if she finally feels sorry. As if she didn’t just stand there.

She looks aghast when I push her away, and maybe it is a bit too much. Maybe I should have just let her. But that’s not it. 

It’s that know now, and I go straight upstairs, and lock myself in my room once again. Hear the car pull up under my window. And I pick it up, one more time.


	4. puzzle pieces

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNrtbl6ddZM

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> geez this is long shouldn't I be in school or something ? oh and watgc out things start gettin.........
> 
> oh and theres a subtle Price of Salt reference in ehre somewhere if u find it u get a cookie ig

It isn’t a bad thing, to give up. To fall backwards, into oblivion. It isn’t bad because sometimes that’s what you need, to simply give up. To surrender to the call of limbo, to spend a bit of time in the sweet embrace of emotion, in order to calm down, if nothing more. And when you have finished, all that is needed of you is to rise once again, take a breath through clear, spider-thin lungs, and keep walking down those tracks.

I think somewhere down the line, I figured out I wasn’t on a train. I was never riding in the comfort of a single, destined vehicle, or maybe at some point I had simply fallen out, left to wander in whatever direction I fancied at the time. It was as if suddenly I opened my eyes, instead of reaching my hands around me in the dark for the rest of God knows how long.

 

And this is what I am deciding to open them to. To what’s best. For me, at least. Finished with being weak, being in oblivion. Finished with holding on to things I don’t need to hold on to. And this is how I do it.

 

_Kuvira,_

_I remember you speaking of your habits as if they bear the sustainability of solid rocks. I remember you speaking of a lot of things. But that in particular stood out to me, because it, I regret to say, isn’t true. A habit is not a solid rock, not if it is the kind that is already screwing you over without the help of the thing you use it to get away from. And holding on to one of those will not keep you in place, it will have you opening your eyes to see yourself caught in a landslide because you didn’t hold on to solid ground as it came over you._  
I feel like you’ve been letting so many things overcome you, so many superficial, pointless things--all these things that have been walling you in for so long, things that seem to matter and make significant impact in the present, but should not be able to--  
I believe you have at minimum two options. To stand up, get going and save yourself, or continue to live under the surface of this cesspool of pain and vague anxiety until you come to realize you cannot bear the place of your own accord.  
I care about you. I want you to figure this out, and I want to help you with that. 

_Just something to think about._

_Su_

 

A number, below.

There’s something definitely refreshing that reading that through the first time brings, and then the next time, and even the next. I can’t exactly figure it out at first, end up placing it on just how fucking brash the words are. It didn’t sugarcoat, the standpoint is almost stunningly realistic, and transforms this from something cheesy and misunderstood to respectable.Trusting, equalizing. 

Equalizing.

 

Everything downstairs is blue, when I slip through my door, down the stairs, and into the living room, the number written on my palm and my flashlight in hand. SIlent, save for the rhythmic dripping of a faucet in the far distance. I take the chunky receiver from the side table, not entirely sure how far the cord reaches, and drag it to the far corner of the room. Drop myself down between the wall and the back of the couch, torn slightly and coffee-stained. Breathe in like it’ll keep me silent, balancing the phone on my knees and holding my hand up close to my face as I dial, checking and rechecking the number until my eyes hurt.

It rings five or six times, until I consider just letting it go, one finger already poised to hang up when it stops.

 _“Yeah?”_ What am I doing?

“Hey.” I press my mouth to the receiver, trying to stay as quiet as possible as I still struggle to answer intelligently.

_“Vira.”_

“Yeah...I--”

 _“Oh, yeah, I gave you this number.”_ Did she forget so easily? Is this okay? _“That means you’ve read it, right? I honestly didn’t believe you would.”_

Her voice sounds like fucking coffee, all dark and rich and other sappy shit like that, even over the damn phone.

“I didn’t either--I mean I’m glad now, that I did…Yeah.” I settle on that, unsure how to compensate for an injustice only she is aware of now.

_“What’s up?”_

“I…” Shit. “Not anything, really.”

 _“You need someone to talk to.”_ It isn’t a question, just a conjecture, and isn’t too surprising when I think about it.

“I guess.”

She laughs, softly. Almost as quiet as I have to be, and that makes me wonder.

“”Am I bothering you, at all?”

 _“No.”_ More of the vibrations of laughter, a soft, whispery static that somehow makes me feel a million times better. _“I’m not doing anything important.”_

“Are you sure?”

_“Of course. So what made you call? I know ‘s not just cause you wanna talk to me.”_

“I don’t think that’s entirely true.”

_“Isn’t it? You flatter me, really.”_

“I try.” I pull at a string on the sweater I found earlier, until I realize what I’m doing and stuff my hands inside the oversized cocoon instead, phone resting against my shoulder.

_“It’s really late, isn’t it?”_

“Am I keeping you awake?”

_“Not at all. It’s a school night for you, though.”_

“You too.”

_“It’s not the same.” Her voice is more muffled now, not connection-wise, but muffled all the same. I lift my head, squinting over the couch to the clock._

2:34 A.M.

“I think I want...I think I want to tell you.”

_“You want to tell me what’s going on.”_

“I don’t know, maybe.”

_“Alright.”_

“Would you listen?”

 _“Don’t know. Maybe.”_ I find myself smiling, just at how half-asleep she sounds. Or half-drunk. I have to force the corners of my mouth down, heaven forbid a mouse sees me blushing over a phone call.

“You’re falling asleep on me, aren’t you?”

My answer is long-coming, preceded by a few seconds in which I struggle around until I can stare up at the ceiling, head against the floor, and wait.

_“No way. ’m completely awake.”_

 

“So, would you?”

_“Would I what?”_

“Listen. To me. If I decided to tell you.”

_“Of course I would.”_

 

_“Oh shit.”_

It’s amazing, because I’ve actually drifted off when her voice comes back over the phone, which shocks me out of my peaceful descent with it’s sheer volume. Making some indiscernible noise, likely meaning to sound somewhat similar to “what happened”, I pull myself out of the grave I’ve built for myself, everything numb and buzzing. And then there’s her.

_“I just saw what time it is. And you need to go to sleep, it’s like...five hours past your bedtime.”_

2:46

“I don’t have a bedtime. I’m seventeen.”

_“You do now. It’s almost three in the morning, Jesus Christ.”_

“Okay, mom.”

Sleep is too difficult, after that. I find myself thinking too hard, replaying everything in my head like a broken record, keep hearing her voice in the back of my mind… I don’t know what that means, what it means for me. For us. In fact, there hardly should be considered an “us”, at this point. At any point. There is no us, in stark actuality. Any relationship perceived by me is less concrete than the shadow of tree branches falling across my floor, and how they look like fingers out of the corner of my eye.

3:54

I want it, even so. And deciding I want it takes me no more than the next twelve hours, in nothing but a state of pensiveness and vague detachment, going through my normal routine with little account, only slight knowledge of what I do and where I go. I keep remembering the letter, as I’ve stamped it on the back of my mind. Keep remembering the first of conversations, and a much different one I was hardly present for, one carried on by no less than Mel. Thirty-eight, that’s how old she said she was. The little queer asked her herself.

I’m still thinking about that, how that’s nineteen years at the least. Nineteen years. How her son is in my grade, even. (That was an amazing conversation, someone’s last name being thrown around and suddenly I’m left wondering how the cold, dismissive genius boy in homeroom could possibly have relation to the bombastic personality I’ve been witnessing for the past few weeks.) Nineteen years. How do I have that relationship, without slipping into either territory not unlike that of a parent with a child, or something frowned down upon by most societies?

Nineteen years.

 ......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

I do class with her, I make it. I think it’ll be awkward but it’s really not, since we hardly cross paths, she’s showing some small girl with impressive eyeliner and short, almost orange hair how to do splits in the silks, and I hang back in the shadows. 

I don’t know what else to do, so I watch. Probably a good thing too, if her skill will ever be my goal. It’s heard hundreds of times, in about every situation of this sort. The way she handles it. Effortlessly.

It’s so _perfect_. Doesn’t even seem like she tries, all wrapped up in instructing the other girl, talking down about form and things of that sort.

“She’s just like a freaking lemur, huh?”

I draw myself reluctantly out of the trance I’ve slipped myself into to watch a guy I don’t even know slide up beside me, arms folded.

“I see the resemblance.” Laughing along, I watch him do the same thing, surprisingly, until I can’t even tell if he’s heard me, and turn to watch again. 

Maybe I do see the resemblance. But somehow, it seems way more graceful than that, maybe a snake, or…

“I’m sure she’s made some kind of deal with the devil for that kind of…”

“...magnetism.” I finish, and he looks back at me. For a second I start to panic, I think, my throat closing up. I don’t know why. But as soon as he’s turned, he turns away again, huffing once in the back of his throat in vague amusement. 

“Right.”

The metallic sound of the bell echoes through our silence, and she drops from the silk maze carelessly, tapping almost soundlessly on the mat below as everyone starts to drift out, chattering animatedly, and in some cases, groaning in pain. Aerial class, man.

“Kuvira.”

I look up, and she’s already looming over me, the guy beside us taking his good time in stretching out. 

“Can you be in my office in...three minutes?”She presents it as casually as if she’s scheduling a business meeting, when I’m fairly certain we both know it’s much, much more.

“Sure.”

She disappears again with a smile at the guy next to me, and I move to stand without noticing the expression that’s spread across his sparsely-bearded features.

“What the hell did you _do_?”

“What do you mean?”

He gives me an expression I hardly understand at first, but I guess at soon enough. I felt the same way that first time, of course.

“Did you get in _trouble_ with her? How could you possibly manage that?”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what?”

“Hard to explain.”

She looks considerably less intimidating when I step inside, as I’ve noticed she always does when she’s not facing a class of twenty-nine irritable teenagers. I let the door tap carefully against the frame, and she motions vaguely in indication, eyes glued to the concealed computer screen as I reach behind me to pull it closed. 

“Hey, Vira.”

“Well?”

“Last night…” She looks up for a second, before returning to her screen, makes a few clicks, then turns completely my way, fixating me with that familiar, hypnotic stare. “You mentioned something I consider pretty important.”

Did I?

“And I was wondering...if you wanted to talk.” Her eyes travel away quickly, flitting around the room once as she processes something. “About said...concept.”

 

Oh. _Oh_.

It hits me like a, well, a train, what I really did say last night, and the fact that I’d forgotten nearly all of that promise. God, I’m terrible. She’s probably been thinking about this all day, too.

“Can I...take you out again?” She blurts out, even though I can’t tell why it’s so hard. For her, I mean. And then she continues, covers up, eases back into her normal visage. “I’m sorry, but I seem to be incredibly occupied for the next few hours, so...tonight...Can I pick you up tonight?”

“Why not?” I try to make it careless, try to make it cheerful, struggling at the other end of her fluctuating stance.

“Perfect.” She allows me one thing, then. A small, unforced smirk, before turning away and letting me go, to flounder in the sea of nerves and endless worry. At least for the next few hours.

Those next few hours are haunted by what I am going to tell her. As difficult as it presents, it almost seems too easy, when I think about it. Hi, yes, my father is a drunk who never stops fighting with my mother, who sleeps around, and I’m emotionally unstable. How is your life?

It just doesn’t feel right. It feels like I’m seeking attention. Like I want her to pity me, if I say those things. I can’t say those things.

 _“We can go somewhere, I don’t know. We’ll figure it out,”_ is what she told me.

So I do it, in the small hope--no--in the _trust_ that that destination is somewhere good for me. Whether or not I spill, I go. I wait, sneak out five minutes before the time she provides, sit on the curb in the shadows of the tree branches, breathe. Wait for her to come up like we planned, at the corner, without turning onto my street.

Stepping into that car is like stepping into a fond memory, the warmth, the radio playing softly in the background, the faint scent of cigarettes. I probably melt the second I close the door, and I swear Su knows it, the way she looks at me out of the corner of her eye, but I don’t care.

“Where are we going?”

“Fuck, I don’t care.”

 

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

 

“Are you...planning on telling me what you said you would, or have you been rethinking it?”

We’ve pulled up to a place I know. That’s familiar. This little, deserted strip of tarmac off the side of the river that runs through the park and all the suburban area, with unkempt grass and scattered with trees. The river itself has been fenced off for years, around this area. Too close to the playgrounds.

 

“I don’t know.”

“Alright.”

She lights a cigarette, rolls down the window until the night’s cool breeze hits my face. I’m almost certain she’s expected this, by the way she reacts so readily. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. It’s peaceful. How she waits, almost as if she knows I’m trying, but somehow does so that I don’t feel the pressure at all. How can she do that? Make me feel so comfortable I don’t at all feel as if I’m being a burden?

We just sit there, with the radio still humming electronically in the background songs I don’t even know but make me feel at home,

“I remember coming here as a kid.”

“It’s pretty nice, to say the least.”

“My parents used to take me here, up by the playground at least. I remember one day...I don’t remember what I was doing, but I wandered off by the side of the river, hid in the trees. At least, I ended up hidden. I just wanted to explore.”

She smiles, says I sound like her son.

“So when they noticed I was missing, they came looking for me, but couldn’t find me anywhere. I remember it being fun, just kind of a mindless game of hide-and-seek. I was an inconsiderate child.” I add, and she smiles back, knowingly, no doubt. 

“But all they really did about it was yell...and that frustrated me, ‘cause it was just supposed to be a game and suddenly they’re trying to kill each other because I might have just fallen into the lake. And it was all I got out of it, too. It shocked me.”

I turn here, only to find her looking back at me, expression serious. Draws herself up against the door, one hand raised near her mouth.

“...and it continued.” I decide to close rather idiotically, but at a loss for what to say next.

 

“You’re household is straying into dysfunctional territory, is what you’re saying?”

“I think if anyone’s becoming dysfunctional, just at the moment, it’s me.”

“Aren’t you a reflection of just that, though?”

“One might say.”

She turns back, nods, obviously deep in thought by the distant expression on her face. Moves to change out the C.D. in the radio, then responds calmly.

“I think you need to disassociate from the relationship of your parents, draw yourself away, in a manner of speaking. Don’t take the weight of their fuck-ups onto your shoulders.”

“Ignore it?”

Kuvira there’s not much else you’re capable of...I understand that can be difficult, but…” She trails off, before coming back readily. “Okay, here. Talk to me about it, from now on. Transfer some stress. That sounds alright, right?”

“I can do that.”

I get a sympathetic look, that I meet with a confidence that wavers only slightly. And there’s a silence that isn’t really silent but filled with soft music, full and complete. Incredibly calm, just like the last time. Dreamlike.

 

 

“What’s your family like?”

And she...oh God. And she feels like someone I should only have seen in a movie, just, I haven’t.

“Well there’s a lot of it, I can’t say I know where to start.” She rushes, maybe too caught off guard but still hardly showing it.

“That’s okay.”

“Try the glovebox, I’m pretty sure I have an album or something still in there.”

I do as she says, and underneath the discarded C.D.s and pens I do find a small, chunky kind of leather book, filled cover-to-cover by the feel of it in my hands.

“You can look, I don’t care.”

I feel like I’m trespassing and by the look on her face she can tell, but as long as she says it’s okay, I decide that it really must be. 

She doesn’t watch, but rolls down the window and lights another cigarette, staring out across the deserted area pensively.

 

It seems that no one is ever still in the pictures I find inside. They’re always either taken in motion, I feel like, or attempted to be taken of people being still, but end up never working out, a turning head or a wandering hand, or someone in the background. Everything races by, slightly blurry at times, almost like they are taken straight from memory. They might even seem distasteful, to some people, as blurry and often difficult to make out as they are, but I love them. I love the whirling kind of motion that points out this family instantly.

Once in a while, however, I do find one that’s perfectly still. A small girl with long, dark hair, holding a kitten of equal wide, green eyes and raven fur, in almost every picture she shows up in. An even smaller one, hair wild and cut to the ears, cute and vaguely intimidating as inconspicuous as her image may be. There are two others, racing through their picture like tiny whirlwinds, mirror images, with matching smiles and soccer jerseys. The guy I met in homeroom, her oldest son, is in here too, sometimes, always bookish and aloof, like he would much rather be off doing astrophysics or something.

And once in a while, she’ll say something, point something out, explain loosely why someone is being tied to a tree and why she allowed it, if only to convince me she isn’t one of those people who tie their children to trees. I didn’t think those existed. Neither does she. 

It almost feels like I’ve looked into something too exclusive, too personal. Too much of her soul. She’s just allowed me to do that, to see so much of a life I’ve never experienced. That I have no business being a part of.

“It’s perfect.” I hear myself say with no hesitation, turning the last page slowly, letting it fall against the others almost in reluctance, to have the experience end. There’s a pause, nothing between us but the smell of smoke and the sounds of outside, and the lingering memory of years bypassed in my hands. Then she laughs quietly, sets her head back against the seat, and says confidently:

“You’d better believe it, that’s my life’s work right there.”

 

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

 

“So you’ll keep calling me, won’t you?”

“As long as you keep answering.”

“And I’ll keep driving you around in the middle of the fucking night, as long as you keep coming out.”

 

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

Things are--perhaps unsurprisingly...better, with Su around. My one confidant. In fact, I find that over the next few weeks, I start to need others less and less, because whatever void I struggled to fill with the meager satisfactions of doing something with friends, is instantly completed just in a moment with her.

I don’t love her, at least not like Mel does, but there’s something, definitely something there that makes me feel all floaty and ethereal when I’m around her. It’s just that I get so much out of being around her, the soup kitchen to my lowly homeless girl. She’s my subsistence, appreciates me more than anyone, takes more time for me, is my therapist and role model and kind of best friend rolled up into a singular. gorgeous creature with a taste for nicotine and dream pop.

I’m probably in love with her.

 

Amid it all, however, things do happen. Things are bad at the house, still, but then that isn’t so bad anymore. Things at school get fucking ridiculous, and only because I start to get questioned. I know it’s much better this way, as long as no one is questioning all the longing glances thrown across the room in aerial class. This is simple. 

Mostly my friends start it, and then it shows up in others, and suddenly I might as well just be spray-painting all over the walls about my probable queerness. It’s stupid as hell, and I know it, and it hardly bothers me because I probably am queer ever since I started romanticising over my coach, but god is it annoying. And Mel eats it up, amid her whispering and teasing all through our classes, her unintentionally spot-on guesses about my gay crush.

I mean it’s how I realized. All her intrusive, gross comments during class only started pissing me off, and only led to me snapping, one day. Just whipping around as we walked together and _slamming_ my fist into her face, and for no other reason than she wouldn’t shut up about cleavage long enough to appreciate everything else. And when I do, she smiles back, eyes wide in surprise, and wipes the trickle of blood from her nose with the back of her hand, leaving a long, orange streak across her skin. And it takes everything in me not to just ask her right there if she’s ever noticed all her freckles, or how her smile makes people want to melt. If she actually has noticed any of those remarkable things that cause people to love her so _damn_ much, not just more reasons to want to fuck her…

And that’s how I end up in the dark of my room at one in the morning of the next day, staring across to the window and the shadows coming through it and thinking, for the first time, how hard I’ve screwed myself over.

 

So when one of the guys from class, some idiot with big muscles and stupid hair suddenly thinks he can prince charming his way into a girlfriend, I nearly cry from happiness. Until word gets around. And a certain someone picks up on it. Even if we never brush upon the subject, it’s still awkward. Something in the air. I think she’s surprised, but I don’t know why. 

So I focus on getting myself back together, after the debacle of who is and isn’t into girls, and pretend it doesn’t matter. Especially when the idiot gets my number from God knows who and calls, gets my father instead, and leaves me gasping for air under the rising waters of his drunken infuriation and powerful hand.

And like the broken, incompetent child I am, I go straight for my room, his reprimands still ringing in my ears, promises to confine me to the house, never let me out again, straight out the window, and straight to the corner to wait for her.

 

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . 

I jump in like the car is an oasis, and I’ve been trekking through the desert for hours.

 

“You’re always hanging out with me. Aren’t you ever interested in people your own age?”

It’s the first thing she says, and it stings softly, but in a few seconds I grasp that I’ve missed a bit of the context.

“Nearly everyone my age is a complete douche,” her eyebrows raise at this, and I add in a quiet “If I’m being honest.”

“I understand that. And what about that guy...the…” She forgets what to say about him, and only stares for a second. It’s only so funny because I actually never said a thing to her at all concerning the guy. Even though she seems to believe I should be pouring out my heart to her about him.

“Luke?”

“That’s the one.” She even looks a bit disgusted when I mention the name.

“Nearly forgot he existed. He’s been asking me over just about every day this week.”

“And you haven’t?”

“Hell no.”

“Thank God.”

“I...you know I’m only in this relationship because…” Because I’m trying to cover up the fact that opening up about the real person I’m in six feet deep for would get me beaten up in a back alley. I don’t need to say that though, she already has me covered.

“I don’t, I really don’t. I may have a...vague suspicion, but I didn’t want to say anything about it lest you be serious about this.”

“You thought I’d seriously date some guy who thinks fighting like a girl is an insult and knowing how to cook makes him look gay?”

“Oh God, now that I know _that_ …” She runs a hand back through her hair, looking thoroughly disgusted. “Good job. Good job on doing better than that.”

“I try.”

“But it still doesn’t answer what...what the hell you’re dating him for…”

“Well I’m quite sure it’s over anyways, so there’s not much point in speculating.” It sounds too snappy, and I subconsciously punch myself straight in the gut. Even though she doesn’t seem to mind at all.

“How come?”

“My sweetheart of a father picked up his call earlier. Just now, actually.”

“And chased him off?”

“Chased me off too.” I try to laugh at that, but the humor is so vacant it sounds sad as hell.

“Vira.”

“It’s alright. I just feel so...helpless. I don’t like being at his mercy.”

I don’t think I’ve seen her look this sad yet. Genuinely empathetic. Not even when I fucked up my knuckles and she had to tell me to go clean them. But she looks over, expression stony, and reaches out, maybe even roughly--but never roughly, only passioned--.

Her hand comes down and turns my face, and her eyebrows shoot up, her voice low and intense.

“That’s a bruise.”

“Hadn’t noticed.” I didn’t know he had hit me that hard.

“Kuvira he can’t _do_ that.”

“He was exceptionally drunk and angry tonight.”

“I don’t care what it was!” It shocks me a bit, just the suddenness in volume, how two seconds sends her up to the brink, and it brings me some weird nostalgia, 

“Look, it’s okay. Don’t worry about it, it was an accident.”

She stops, leans back to light up a cigarette, frowning around it. We share a look that says nothing.

“Promise me you won’t allow this, cause I sure as hell don’t.”

“I promise.”

 

“Do you want to talk more tomorrow? I need to take you home anyways, as much as I don’t want to.”

“I guess so.”

So she takes me home. It makes me feel like I’m sinking, just because I’ve been the one to bring out that certain emotion in her. It stunned me, I guess. Or maybe it’s simply my reluctance to return to being alone. Me meeting her tonight was an escape from my solidarity, and the dark, and my general loneliness. And this is bothering me way more than it should.

“See you tomorrow.”

 

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

I don’t know when Su plans on talking to me today, so when class ends, and she tells me to hang behind, something about a few pointers when it came to a pose, I’m left debating over her true course of action. She seems aloof, not fully there,and I hope it isn’t due to the previous night. The room empties too slowly, and I try not to look conspicuous as everyone drifts out like salmon upstream.

She only pops up after they’ve left, and I turn, blurting out anxiously.

“You said you had a few…”

She barely glances my way before walking straight out, back over the mat and leaving me to trail behind. I hardly expect her to turn around before reaching the silks, cracking her knuckles casually, then waving me over.

“Come here.”

I step so carefully I almost begin to believe the mat could truly be thin ice on my own, like I could just fall through once I get too close. But I do it. Mirror her stance, not entirely sure what this is, but a hundred percent sure it’s not pointers.

She smiles, incredibly slightly, but I do catch it. And for some reason it makes me feel better, the one spark that it took to crackle the candle in my mind into a small, wavering flame strong enough to melt the unsteady ground on which I walk, freeing me from the unsureness that made me so timid as I began. Steps forward with one foot, hands loose fists at her sides, and says, almost commandingly.

“Punch me.”

“What?”

“With everything you could possibly have.”

 

“What if--”

“--No to ruin the experience...but trust me...you won’t.”

I punch her. At least, I think I do, for about one full second before I’m staring at the rafters and am acutely aware of a tingling in my right arm.

“Come on.” I take the hand I’m offered, and might be a bit taken aback by the raw strength she hoists me back up with, if I hadn’t just been slammed into the floor. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Try it again.”

I try it again, like an idiot. Her hand comes down, against my arm, but stops. She meets my eyes. Goes slowly.

“Got it?”

“Not really.”

“Here. Try it.” And we switch, and she moves her fist slowly, directing me, showing me how to twist her arm until I get it right and have ducked out of the way of the hit, twisting her arm away from the target.

She shows me how to hurt, to cause pain. How to defend myself. It’s kind of weird, kind of personal. But not.at all so.

 

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

“Thanks. For that.”

“It makes me feel better. Even though I wish I didn’t need to.”

 

“”Are we going out tonight?”

“Do you want to?”

“I’ll...be okay. I think I need sleep, too.”

“That’s right. Are you going to call?”

“As long as we don’t talk about this. I’m tired of talking about this.”

“Okay.”

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

I camp out in my little crevice between the couch and the wall that night, a blanket coiled around me and the phone drawn up to my ear. This is it. This is my therapy, when I don’t go out with her.

_“You ready for finals?”_

“Hell no.” I’ve become well-practiced in the art of staying silent enough not to wake anyone when I make these calls, nearly whispering directly into the receiver. Not that I’ve ever been caught. God, would that be a mess.

_“No failing. Don’t want to have to kick you out of aerial, these things work like the sports teams.”_

She’s kidding, but the sadist pleasure I imagine comes from eliciting this pressure onto me makes me smile unconsciously. I guess it’s a teacher thing. And she’s become no exception to their confusing and twisted ways. I’ve lost her. Lost her to the dark side.

I’ve never felt so close. To opening my eyes and not being alone. To reaching out and finding someone, even if that someone is the worst someone. The worst someone, of course, to get urges to tangle my fingers up in the hair of, knowing it’s probably all messy like I’ve seen it when it’s down, kind of wild and unchecked. Pulling it back, running my fingers through it, just to lean over and--

Stop it.

_So i was thinking…”_

So was I. Thinking about you, and your hair, of all things, and how your lips would feel under mine. Just platonic things, right? For my worst someone.

I am a shameful, shameful beacon of sin.

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

Somehow, I make it through my finals. Su doesn’t even give us one, just lets us fuck around during the period, and I spend the allotted hour and a half taking down silks with her. Which is the singularly most nerve wracking and potentially deadly thing I’ve done in my entire life.

But as we fold them all up in baskets and take them down to her car, her complaining half-heartedly about why she’s in charge of washing them when they’re school property, I start thinking again. I shouldn’t, so I put it out of my mind and cram the last roll of fabric into her trunk.

She’s looking at me when I get it closed, leaning up against the side of the Jag, arms folded. It’s the kind of look that makes me feel transparent, but with her it’s a good thing.

“Hold on.”

She turns around, arms still crossed, and ducks into the front seat before coming out again, barely allowing me time to prepare before dropping into my hands a slim square of wrapping paper.

“You didn’t…”

“I did.”

It’s wrapped almost impeccably, all perfect corners and not too much tape. It’s a CD, like I couldn’t have guessed, still in the plastic wrap and everything.

“I...had a feeling it was kind of your type.”

“How did you know that?”

“The first time I played Nirvana in the car with you, I could tell.“

“You’re so observant.”

“You’re easy to observe.”

“I just...now all I need is the C.D. player.” It’s meant to be a joke, because I don’t expect her to be prepared for this, but she smiles back, and my eyes go wide.

“Ok...so maybe I had a feeling.” Ducking back into the driver’s seat, she comes out this time with an already _wrapped_ package, very obviously just that, and drops it into my hand.

“Now don’t look at me like that, it was relatively cheap.”

“I can’t believe you.”

“And why not? You’re practically just another child to me, by now.”

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

I spend the break locked in my room, falling in and out of love. Out of love with the holidays, out of love with snow, the kind of commercialized, last-minute shopping holiday season that makes me want to retch, with baby albino Jesus in his plastic manger and store-bought sugar cookies. I fall weirdly, unnaturally in love with the shadows in my room and blaring music, and my own solidarity. The obscure, screaming, too-deep lyrics that come pouring out of the fancy headset I got from Su, the one that came with the CD player that I begin to tote around with me like an intravenous. In fact, I fall harder in love with everything, especially Su, which I’m damn sure I needed, but, well…

I hardly see her, of course. At some point, knee-deep in finals and stress and desperation, I thought that maybe we’d see each other quite a bit at this point, but it was stupid, and she’s always busy, even though we talk on the phone longer and without bedtimes.

One day, I actually build up the courage to tell her I miss her, and the reaction is nothing short of beautiful. No awkward answers, or spells of silence that make me want to shoot myself in the face. I sit by as she launches straight into an all-out brainstorm of ways we could see each other again, since she always seems to be doing something now, decorating, sustaining a menagerie of excited children on their school break, blowing through the slim paycheck of coach wages on a myriad of gifts for said menagerie--and I still can’t be let out of the house. Oh, he was serious about that.

 _“What are you doing for New Years?”_ She finally asks, breathless and kind of desperately, and I kind of smile before even thinking of the answer.

“Well, my mother has something she’s going to I think...and I can make a pretty solid bet you-know-who’s going to be off getting wasted somewhere or other. Kind of wish I was off getting wasted somewhere or other.”

She laughs.

“And you?”

I catch the distinctive sound of her sigh, but even then she launches into it readily.

_“Baatar has some big...work...thing, so I’ve been kind of abandoned to supply an endless stream of pizza rolls to a full soccer team’s worth of teenage boys--the twins thought I was okay with the babysitting..I’m not.”_

“I must say that sounds incredible.”

_“Come over.”_

I’m hardly aware of the fact that I sit in silence for so long, until she starts again, unanswered.

_“I mean sure it’s a little unconventional, to bring you over like this, but you’re going to be alone otherwise. And I don’t like that.”_

I feel like I’ve been sent rocketeering off into space with that. When I’ll slow down, or when I’ll slam head-on into a planet is only a matter of time, and I’m aware of that, but until then I say I’d love that, and soon enough it’s just me, and the dead line of the phone, and my building anxiety.

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

Making it the rest of the year is difficult, to say the least. I feel so close, as if I’m running out of time, but then like I’m at one end of a vast desert with nothing but willpower to get me to the other. I feel hyped up, too excited, so excited I have trouble thinking, spending every day and night immersed in my music and my thoughts, sometimes sketching, sometimes doing nothing at all. I get so uptight I do this entire puzzle, one of those thousand-piece shitstorms, only to get to the end and find one piece missing. One of a thousand.

 

And when she comes to pick me up that night, I feel like I’ve found it again.

“How’s that C.D. player working out for you?”

“”Really great, actually. It’s getting me through all those hours I’ve been spending at home, for sure.”

 

“That’s great.”

Her house is incredible, this grandiose, three-floored by the looks of it, palace of a building, with windows all over, and a rock garden with wind chimes that shine from the trees and where they hang off the porch. It hardly looks out of place in the lavish neighborhood we drive through to get to it, but I still find it incredible. It’s very much like her, refined and tasteful, still with one of the uncurtained windows lit up to show what appears to be a coterie of teenagers getting pumped up over a video game.

“Yeah, this might be difficult.” She adds in before parking up in the shadow of an impressively-sized garage, slamming the door carelessly. I follow suit, shadowing her up the steps until my leg bumps up against something firm and slightly furry, and I look down.

Suddenly this cat is staring back at me, eyes glistening the dark, and I only watch a it proceeds to wind around me like I’m a post, sparing no mind for what I may have been doing before its phantomlike arrival.

“That’s Shiva.”

“From the--” She nods.

“She’s demoniac.” She says it in a way that should probably be jokingly, but returns my glance with complete sincerity. And when I look back down, she’s gone. Vanished into the night. I also get the distant feeling that I’m being observed. By the cat? Probably. Maybe something more powerful.

We make it through the house, ducking out of the way of congregating party-goers, clustering like bees around the wide television screen. I’m stuck for a second just taking in my provident surroundings, and she pulls me back through a door and into an equally expensive-looking kitchen. Oh fuck are they _loaded_.

“Didn’t even notice.”

“Thank God. They would have dragged you in. I might have had to explain.” She says it all like she’s held her breath all this time, and it starts to occur to me the same as she moves in the direction of the sliding door across the room.

I follow a few steps behind, thinking about explanations.

“You coming?”

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

We talk. We talk longer than we ever have before, curled up in deck chairs on the back porch, comfortably set away from the party. We talk about anything, everything, as long as the other continues to respond and she keeps pouring glasses from the bottle of wine she’s brought with us. She reassures me she has no plan to get drunk. Not a lightweight by any standards.

She’s frustrated about this, that she got stuck here watching all of these kids when all she wants to do is drive. Frustrated, but not angry.

“I told him I was alright with it. I am, still.”

“I get that.” I tuck my arms tighter around me, a makeshift straightjacket. What I would do without those confines, God only knows. Probably throw myself across the table.

“You haven’t told me hardly anything about him.”

I don’t know how to place her reaction. Expectant, speculation heavy in her expression as she looks off to the side in vague wonderment.

“Where would I start?” It seems that she asks herself more than me, so I keep my mouth shut. I don’t know if I should be asking, for that matter, but I can’t help it. All I’ve seen are pictures, a word here and there as she’s mentioned him. 

My curiosity is justified. And by no means associated with my feelings for her.

“He’s a sweetheart, really. I feel like you’d like him. Just nice as hell, very compassionate. Sees the best in everybody.” She smirks, eyebrows raising and adding under her breath, “Found a ‘best’ _somewhere_ in me.”

“Shut up.”

There’s no cigarette tonight, her fingers much more occupied with the rim of her glass, and already lost in a smoke more of my own imagining, my overbearing thoughts, no doubt.

I avoid the slipped-in questions about me, the casual inquiries about my state of mind, the questions that make me feel weird, too aware of my own situation. I feel shocked out of my own comfortable ignorance, and so I avoid them. Until she won’t let me.

“Vira, are things really alright? You’ve been brushing off my questions.”

There’s a faint lipstick stain on the edge of her glass. I know how cliche it is of me to find that.

“I don’t know.”

The resulting “oh” is quiet, tainted with disappointment, thrown off. It starts to make me think otherwise of my wording.

“Would you like to talk about it?”

“I don’t think so. Thanks, I mean…”

 _“Don’t.”_ She snaps, backtracking, “I just, well...I care about you. Don’t think you need to _thank_ me for caring like I do-- it’s just, well... _normal_.” She focuses at a spot on the deck, voice dropped to nearly a whisper.

“Oh.” It’s ironically all that I can manage, with her speaking in this manner. It’s hard, and the slightest bit uplifting, and leaves me not knowing quite _what_ to say.

“I really do, you know. Care. What with all this shit with your father, and...Sometimes it even...gets a bit much. How strongly I feel about all this, how often I...think.” She finishes the glass, moving it slowly across the rail with the tip of her finger, then hums in slight laughter. “You should hear the way Baatar will tease me about never shutting up about you…”

Never shutting up about me. I don’t know if that makes me feel like a god or just vaguely uncomfortable. She talks about me. People notice. It leaves me bursting with a giant question mark, just a confused, internal leap of unflagged emotion.

She smirks, involuntarily hiding behind a hand.

“He thinks he’s being replaced.”

“Seriously?”

“He’s just being melodramatic. I can’t say why, I always thought that was my trope.”

“More so in my case.”

“Must be contagious.”

We laugh about it, and then she blinks, straightening up. A small frown starts to firm as she pushes her fringe away.

“Wow, maybe I am a lightweight.”

I smile back, only silently hoping she has retained most of the truth in those statements.

“Shit and i still need to drive you _home_.” Her eyes go wide, and she turns to the side to rake a hand through her hair. Just let me stay here, I try to say, forget about my parents, I can sneak in in the morning. But I can’t. And I let her go, to go attempt to make herself sober enough to drive, and ignore the distant yells of teenagers in the living room, counting it down, counting down the minutes until everything is new, and everything is okay. I imagine how they think it means, a fresh start, a new chapter. It doesn’t feel like that to me. 

I slide my hand over, letting my finger come up to touch her abandoned glass, running over the faint stain left by her bottom lip against the crystal. It doesn’t feel new, to me.

There’s a countdown, and cheering. The windows reflect on the grass in wide, yellow squares, warped by the shadows of people passing.

And this is exactly how it turns 1994, with me out here touching a lipstick stain like it’ll ever be the real thing, and so completely _alone_ it nearly surprises me. And I know I’m spending the rest of the year probably exactly this way. Alone...and starting now. I can tell myself that I have my friends, I have Su, but however many times I get close like this, it always gets ripped right away again.

“Sorry I missed it.”

“Not much to miss anyways. Nothing’s changed. Same problems exist.”

Expecting a response, I look back and find her staring back at me, concern heavy in her expression.

“Don’t get melodramatic on me, now.”

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

It’s good for me when the semester starts, and not just because I get to see Su so much more. For one, everything from the last semester, everything about me, is forgotten, and so is someone else. 

Mel stops her obsession. She doesn’t plan it, it just...slows down. She starts talking less, and less, and I start to suspect it might have been my fist against her nose. I’m not proud of myself, but man, if that was my doing...I may be, just a _little._

 

“Hurry up.” She urges me when we get together that night--only a week into January--, pulling away faster than usual. I barely get time to accustom myself to the space, but look back at her, head high and determined, and laugh.

“Why?”

“There’s a place I’m taking us, and it’s a bit far.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I may not even know how to get there anymore, but that’s okay...because...because you have _faith_ in me.” She points at me in earnest, and I almost hold back my laughter. I needed this. She knows I needed this, however anxious she looks as she drives us away from the suburbs and closer to the freeway, twisting her finger up in her necklace again, and again, then letting it drop. We drift along, separate to our own thoughts.

 

“That necklace you’re always wearing. What is it?”

The second I ask, something seems to implode, not in a bad way, but implode in our surroundings. Like a giant bubble, encompassing me inside it, has just broken, and suddenly nothing is keeping us apart. It’s personal. Now, it’s personal.

I watch her hand go up to it, silently, instinctively, as she’s done a million times before and is reminded to do again right now, finger running across the stone that lies in the center. I think it’s a peridot, at this point, maybe jade, hanging precisely in the dip between her collarbones, as if it at her have been created to go together like this. As if she is really part of some alien race, bearing these small jewels as a biological part of themselves from conception.

I enjoy thinking of her as an alien. As some intergalactic spy, or refugee, touched down on American land to live out a forged, ordinary lifestyle comfortably under the government radar.

But she’s human. That’s a fact, and I’m aware of it. A human story, a human past. Shares feelings that are very much, undeniably, human.

“It’s just something I’ve had for a while.”

She catches my disbelieving look, because she sighs, still smiling faintly.

“Okay, fine. Baatar gave it me , on my twentieth birthday. It’s kind of special, I guess.”

“That’s too sweet.”

“It’s not a big deal.” She hardly whispers it, as if she can’t bring herself to say it out loud. Like she knows all too well how untrue it is.

“Then why do you say it’s special?”

“You want to know?”

“I kind of do now, please, indulge me. I love thing like this.”

“You will lose all respect for me, I guarantee it.”

“I won’t.” But I do wonder, now, what she means by this, even though knowing her, I can assume that she is merely being dramatic.

“I...I made some _idiotic_ comment, when he did. Something along the lines of why didn’t he just propose to me right there, and, Jesus, you know how he is. He asked if that’s what I wanted.

At first it was just a joke, we were still just two kids that met one summer and spent too much time with our heads in the clouds...But then it was serious. And then… I just blinked and suddenly everything had...fallen into place.”

There’s silence, that I think neither of us are particularly aware of. So she continues, when she realizes.

“It was a bit of a turning point, for me. That’s all. It’s symbolic, kind of my unconventional engagement ring, probably.”

“That’s sweet.”

“It’s __inane.”

“I don’t think so.” Watching this, I pick up on new things, usually hidden in this invisible layer of her, this sensitive, trying too hard to seem dismissive her. It’s raw, stripped away. “I think you believe it’s so stupid because you have it, while tons of people out there would hear it and cry their eyes out, because they don’t have something that pure, that romantic. It’s almost too dreamy.”

“Believe me I cried--” She edges in, and can’t help the unwarranted smile that fucks with my last words.

“I don’t think you see that only because you’ve gotten so used to it.”

“It’s very likely you’re right about that.”

 

There’s something definitely otherworldly about these small excursions that we’ve been taking together, whatever it may be. The unnaturalness of them, giving the fact that they _do_ in fact happen somewhat of an ethereal concept to the matter. Or maybe not.

I like watching her. That isn’t weird, right? But as the Jag carries me farther, and farther away from the house I despise, I find myself drifting ever closer to a state of placidity, universality. Gazing over, curled into the passenger seat as she keeps a steady eye on the road.

She hardly ever holds the wheel with two hands, only one, steady at the very bottom as someone would who had grown so accustomed to driving they hardly must be physically present behind the wheel.

I don’t know. I feel like my extensive knowledge of her quirks is good for me, in a way. Down to how she holds a cigarette. And it also seems to be the closest thing I’ll ever get to seeing inside her own mind. How she works. Outside a high school gymnasium.

 

“Tell me something else about yourself.”

“Anything in particular?”

“Something I don’t know.”

It still worries me when I don’t know if I go too far, but her expressions never are deceiving, and neither is this one. She smiles, unwaveringly, then blinks, fading slightly. I turn and watch this, her thought process, as she turns, suffocating her cigarette in the tray, grinding it between her fingers casually. I know she knows this is good for me. That whatever story she can tell me transports me away from the things I don’t want to think about.

“Alright. There’s...something. But it might be a little personal and I don’t know if you’d like to hear it...I wouldn’t want to put you off.”

This is...problematic. On one hand, if I say that I would, it has the possibility of coming across as prying and creepish, but if I decline...Declining may draw a rift, and i don’t want rifts. If it’s a matter of what I want, for that matter, I want unbounded trust, and closeness, not just another person I have to keep things from. But I’m well aware of...how that works out. Given circumstances.

Well, that’s an exception.

“How personal?”

“Not extremely so.”

I look down, finding the edge of my sweater and pulling a knot from the hem, shrugging carelessly.

“Well, I wouldn’t mind. Jesus, I know your engagement story now, for that matter.”

The smile creeps back across her face, and I watch her, eyes trained on the road and taking a deep breath, exhaling slightly through her mouth. There’s no stutter in her speech, no indication of her reluctance in the way she pronounces the next few sentences, almost as smoothly as if making a statement about the weather, if the tone had been a little less meaningful.

“So maybe I’m a polygamist.”

There’s something about this, today. She almost looks empty, without a cigarette, as if she’s missing a crucial part of what makes her...her. As if she doesn’t quite know what to do with the spare hand. I banish the thought.

“I can’t say I have the slightest idea what that could be like.” She picks up my interest expertly, as if she’s envisaged the entirety of this scene in her head, knowing every move, every possible outcome. At the signs of a route she prefers, I almost catch the burst of excitement, how she straightens up, tone becoming more engaged. I daresay the incompleteness vanishes.

“Okay, so I’m going to explain this by saying first…” She begins, ready to make a point and showing it quite distinctly. “People that you see often opposing the act, that think they know what the significance of the label itself is, they _don’t._ And that’s the problem. They never do.” 

There’s hardly a pause but for her to breathe in softly, fingers gripping the wheel firmly in something I might describe as controlled exhilaration. 

“It’s hardly what everyone seems to think, almost a cult...driven by animalistic, exploratory tendencies that push them to engage in orgies and whatever the hell else people think they do-- it’s not the _slightest_ bit that way, even though those close-minded, hypocritical shitheads never fail to flag polygamists as a group of...slutty, sex-crazed beasts…” It trails away here, voluntarily and slowly, until the sound of the radio is the only thing left for me to hang on to. But when I look back up at her, she hardly looks stunned, or shaken whatsoever at the force of her words. She looks in acceptance...no hint of insobriety in the expression with which she fixates the stream of neon dashes racing under the smooth nose of the car.

“What would you say you are?” A bit of paint crunches up where I’ve run my fingernail over a crease in the console, and I move my hand away, suddenly struck by the idea that I’ve damaged something of such unparalleled magnificence. She doesn’t notice, and I stuff my hand back into my pocket, still eager to hang onto her words. I’ll pray to God of the Jaguars later.

“People.” She shrugs. “They just love a little differently. Feel a little differently.” A quick glance is spared my way, as if she’s curious if I’m still on the same page. I am.

“I think the problems people who oppose it have...are centered around their misconception when it comes to our motivations. The only motivation is quite honestly the same as for monogamy, and is, for lack of a scientific term...it’s an emotion. The kind you might receive from loving one, singular person. The only difference is how we have discovered is best for us to receive that...feeling.”

She leaves off here, perhaps run out of things to say. Know she’s not done, though. Not yet. Her eyes brim with too much fresh passion, too much information needing to be spilled…

“You know what I mean, don’t you? The feeling.”

I do. Oh God I do.

“I have a vague idea.”

“Yeah, okay, so imagine that, but then to have it… in more vastness. To be able to pick out things you love of more than just one person, to have just so much, twice as much, to find in multiple people what most find just with one…”

“That’s romantic as hell, I must say.”

“I admit that I am the most hopeless of all romantics...and...we’re here.”

She stops the car on the side of the road, and at first I see nothing, but follow her outside nonetheless, thoughts full of the feeling and the perks of polygamy. The air is cold as it first hits my face, but I linger for a second, and it fuels me up to follow behind her as she steps over the small ditch that runs along the side of the road.

The moonlight reflects off parallel streams of silver across the grass, maybe twenty feet off the road, and as I draw closer, the shapes of trees become clearer and things come into focus. And then there’s this hulking shape appears at the other side of the rails. This behemoth of a train, long rusted over and standing amid the trees in all its dilapidated majesty under a coat of faded graffiti.

“I didn’t just bring you here to see some old fucking train.” She clears up beside me, surprising me with her closeness to my side. “Just wait.”

“Sure is what it looks like,” I shrug discontentedly and she gives me the look, the one I can still make out in the dim moonlight, and fires back with the utmost seriousness:

“I hope a snake bites you.”

“--A snake?”

“Well, Kuvira,” She gestures at the ground, stopping for the sake of emphasis, “It’s dark, the grass is _quite_ long. How about you just tell me when they start crawling up your legs?” Then looks up, coming back to my side and saying, quieter. “Actually, that’s _true_ , which means you should probably stay close.”

“You’re an idiot.”

She leads us up to it, and I expect her to just step inside,the hole where a door used to be, or stay on the ground, but I end up standing back in silence to watch as she reaches out, hand coming into contact with the rusted side, and grabs one of the higher rungs of the ladder in a single hand.

I watch as she easily scales the side of this creature, and after climbing on top she kneels, waving me up with a wry smile.

“It’s safe. Get out of the snakes.”

Sometimes I swear to God I could write a book just with ways she can smile.

I meet her up there, where she stands proudly, arms crossed, and stares down at the fallen giant beneath her feet before pointing down, and looking straight at me, eyes brimming with pride.

“There. This is my train.”

The top of the car is nearly covered with a neat, slightly faded series of characters, all blocky and made out cleanly in green spraypaint.

“Is this…”

“It’s my name.” She answers readily, crossing her legs before dropping down on the surface, running a finger over a different mark near the edge of the roof. “The only thing I know how to write in Chinese, just so you know.”

“You wrote your name on it?”

“I was a kid.” She laughs, voice contorted in defensive. “We used to do pretty crazy things.”

“I love that.”

We stay up there, as she explains the characters to me and how they’re broken up. How when she was a kid and travelled, she wrote on every place she went, kind of a territorial tagging. Her lasting mark on the world, 

“”I may have been a bit anarchist.” She smirks, adding in, “I probably still am. I mean look at me, taking you out past your curfew.”

 

It’s winter, still. But here it isn’t cold. Here there’s a slight breeze, the cool cover of this train, and I walk to the end, where the tree branches graze the top, and look back over the trees, the pale contrast of the skyline with the treetops. Nature feels in touch with me. Everything feels in touch with me, up to my fingertips, the world filling me up like a jar.

I look back, find her still sitting there, lost in something similar to my own internal labyrinth. Her hair falls down in her face from where it’s come out of its bun, as she looks down off the side, concealing the unreadable expression she fixates on the foliage.

“Maybe one day I’ll take you to the ocean. It’s not far.”

“Maybe.”


	5. crystalline (part one)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwpbzUC2HZ8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * whispers softly* f u c k

I hardly remember anything after that moment.

It’s likely only due to the fact that I am horribly sleep-deprived at this point, and when we finally get back to the car, running away from a sudden rainstorm that neither of us were awfully prepared for, I am so utterly lost in the sea of my thoughts I hardly pay any attention. We talk a bit more, just to pass the long drive, about polygamy, anarchism (Su is apparently “hardcore”, she would have the sign plastered all over the back of her car, except she’s not allowed), ethical dilemmas, deep topics for someone who hasn’t slept in 25 hours. The last night had been rough. 

I turn to leave, when she stops us at the end of the block, get my hand on the door before she stops me, one hand covering mine at the door handle. Tells me to wait, since it’s raining hard, just until it lightens up. I don’t need to be told twice. I don’t think I even open my mouth after that, still lost, still unsure.

All I can say for sure is that, after we agree it’s raining light enough that I could go and I turn to wave goodbye in the passenger seat window, watching her light up a new cigarette and turn to stare down the street and wait until I get onto the path, like she always does before leaving, I end up reaching out. My finger comes into contact with the droplet-encrusted window almost of its own accord, and stays there, until a little spot forms where the crystal drops cling to my fingertip. As if I planned on writing something. As if my hand would drop, leaving the perfect straight line of an “I”.

But then what? What comes after that, such a simple, effortless letter to write, in any case. Any scenario, whether I flung open the door right there and didn’t go to the trouble of standing out there in the cold while I wrote it all, or did, or if I turned right then and walked away as if it never crossed my mind? What if I waited, counted six minutes between the front door and called her the second I could, the second I knew she was home, and told her the things I planned to write, but never could? What if I spelled it out, every day, a letter at a time, because my shivering hand never could have managed any more than the letter “I” anyways?

What if I never did, because I was smart, and realistic, and knew that I placed equivalent, if not superior value on the way she glances my way, mouth turning up in a genuine laugh as my hand moves back from the rushed anarchy insignia I’ve drawn all over her window?

The water would never be thick enough to write out all of that, anyways.

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

And so it goes on. I still keep all my problems, I have days where I break down like a child, end up curled into myself on the floor beside my bed, days where I love the world and everyone in it (these are few, and far between, but worth all the while when it comes down to it). I start eating more, sleeping less, but making up for it on the weekends where I sleep into the afternoon, until I wake up to the sun at its peak and the sounds of cars on the street below my window. My time is split, between school and aerial practices and when I get to see Su, sneaking out in the middle of the night to take another dosage of my perfect, inconsequential drug. In general, you could say I’m doing a hell of a lot better, emotionally. There is a brief time where I actually go to the school’s therapist, a result of constant pressure from certain individuals who I made the careless mistake of opening up to. They mean well, but it hardly lasts. I see her twice, a woman with a superiority complex and factual wordings, then give up. Su always does it better.

Speaking of--I scare myself with how obsessed I begin to be, but only at first. But then I fall into routine, Silent moments of admiration, stolen looks. An emotional carousel of falling in love, being too nauseous to switch my ride, spiraling around and around until I find myself clinging to the pole in silent docility. And I love it. God, I love it. Stolen looks and all.

Stolen looks as in pulling myself up and backwards in a silk, holding myself in place just for the purpose of seeing how long I can do it. Three seconds.

My eyes travel around the sea of people suspended from the ceiling above me, all the damn people not paying a single mind to the blood rushing up to their heads. And the Nausea. And the pain settling into their bones. Eight. 

I lay eyes on her. Oh god, _her_. She’s wearing that smile today, the one that makes her seem like she’s done something to be terribly proud of. I lay eyes on her, and her eyes snap a centimetre to the side, ensnaring me with a moment of undisturbed eye contact, smile unwavering.

Ten.

I start borrowing my looks instead, from then on. Taking long, deep glances her way, until she appears at the other end to pull them right back. It’s a silent, nocturnal kind of relationship that blossoms, one not to be spoken about in public.

So, instead, I direct my attention towards other things in situations like these. What she sounds like across the room, the light hearted pattern of her speech, the occasional curse that slips out unheeded--and how she never quite seems to notice. 

Under my knuckles my hands blister, from friction and a spike in practice, and I stand on the mat for a second and look down at them until the tingling stops. Her hands don’t get like this, practised and rough at the insides. Yes, when I’m closer, I find it typical of me, to have a strange wonderment with her hands--the ones that always seem to be so sure of themselves, the thin fingers, strong, calloused from a lifestyle of climbing, but still gentle when they come into contact with mine, if we’re sparring or just talking and she lays one over mine like she usually does when something goes fragile. I see them now, wish somewhere inside me that I could hold them, anything to ease the throbbing hurt under my own skin, the too-soft skin, always shaking. Unlike hers, the thin fingers, perfect nails and the faded scar that runs down the back of her left, a soft contrasting line just a shade it seems darker than the undisturbed skin. I wonder where it came from. I still haven’t a clue.

And, instead, I focus on distancing myself from each of my parents. I think there’s a part of me that derives a twisted pleasure from disregarding them, as no more than an illusion or even something merely concomitant with my own life. I find little release in the mixing of the two

Strangely, things are more comfortable like that. I don’t know quite when I came to that realization. When I think about it, it makes me feel a little weird, like I’m not trying hard enough to have a normal relationship with them, like I probably should be. But it hardly ghosts on my conscience.

I feel like I turn over a new leaf. One that has whisped away in the breeze, skittering away over the ground the second before i can get my fingers around it one too many times before. A confident leaf. A heading-in-the-right-direction leaf. Things are...strangely okay with the few friends I have left, after a bit of a struggle, but then it’s all late-winter-y and comfortable, and new semesters and the approach of spring and infatuation. The distant anticipation of graduation in the summer, the not-so-anticipation-worthy concept of having to leave class with the one person I…

Whatever.  
......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

 

_“I’m working on what the troupe is going to perform for that big...end of the year debacle you performing arts students seem to enjoy so much...well except you, of course, practically asleep just listening to me ramble on about it.”_

“Hm?” Zoned out, again. Thinking too much, always with my mind on something, she said. My arm is dead beneath me, I’m stretched out behind the couch tonight, resting on a single elbow that has long since gone rigid and unfeeling. Over the phone I catch her scoff of fake annoyance, followed by distinct rustling. I can’t think of anything otherwise to say, so I settle back into those sounds, the slow rhythm of breathing from how she always holds the phone too close to her face. The festival, yeah, that’s what we were talking about. 

_”I was thinking about blowing everyone away, showing off everything you guys have accomplished with the “newcomer”. Shut them up, you know?”_

“I’d probably enjoy that just as much as you. The looks on their faces.” I try to stop the yawn the expands in my chest, but it doesn’t happen.

_“Do you want to pick this up tomorrow?”_

“Maybe.”

_“You’re always so unsure. I’ll see you tomorrow, Vira.”_

The phone clicks back against its stand loudly, too loudly, and I fumble around for the coffee table for a second.

You’re just tired. Imagining wildly, too wildly. Keep it together, Vira. 

_What?_

I try to beat it out of me. Try to go up to my room, smother it out with pillows. It comes over me suddenly, a desperate question as to why, that I can’t answer. Not on my own, at least. In a second I have my textbook out from under my bed and am flipping through pages--

_When did she start calling you that?_

A knock at my door cuts me short. I jump only a bit, consider who it might be, but whatever region of my brain got so excited initially, plummets after a few seconds of rationalizing.

I stand up, sweeping the book off to my side, where it closes with a singular, dull slap, not unlike what I imagine my heart hitting the bottom of my stomach might sound like. I go over, undo the lock slowly, open it, a crack.

“Don’t lock your door.” His speech is crystal, unwarped by drunkenness.

“For what reason?” I snap, but instead of looking taken aback or worked up, he seems to get even more smug. As if he knows I don’t dare to pull on that thread any longer. I’m suddenly very uncomfortable.

“Aren’t you going to open this door?”

“Rather not.”

“Open the door.” I open the door.

He comes right in, crosses his arms, and stares at me. I put distance between us, which seems to be the only thing I know how to do.

“Don't you stand there and think I don't hear you down there.”

  _Deny it._

It seems appropriate. It certainly seems that way, but I can't deny it any better than I can the fact of how useless it would be to do so. 

In the space between his words and mine to come, of course I begin to panic, but I'm thinking all the while, which dulls the effect. He knows who it is, that's the largest concern, but immediately I believe all he can narrow it down to is those in the troupe. In that case, shit, it's probably Mel. Assuming he's made it this far.

“Alright.” I decide on that, top it off with what I hope is a blank look.

“Don't think you won't get away with it, either...” He continues. I stand. I let it go over my head. _“...and you think you can just...and you still...you would rather...you...you…”_

“...I'm considering just pulling you from this dance class of yours, if that's where you're meeting these people.”

And I lose. I lose it. I know it's an empty threat, but almost instinctively I take the bait.

“You can't.”

“Who’s in charge here?”

I know he wouldn't go to the trouble. I know it, deep down, but I can't secure myself on that. I let myself loose, and I don't even try to stop myself. Even the thought of not having aerial, for the class itself as well as all the time I get to spend around Su-- is _hell_ to me.

“Don't you fucking dare take this from me.”

He laughs, fists a hand in the front of my shirt. I tell myself this is where all my training should come in, where all those hours I've spent learning how to defend myself should kick in in a single, practised move, but his hand grips my shirt in a steel vice and there's none of that. I'm frozen, stuck there, even as he gets so close I swear I can taste the bitter alcohol on the air, and tells me to watch my mouth, and shoves me away, closes the door behind him.

Mom left. I knew she would. I know that’s why he hasn’t been drinking, because he’s waiting. Wants to be fully aware when he goes off on her. That’s why he noticed me talking tonight.

You're just scared. Should you move? Should you stay?

You do both. You get up and go back to the door and lock it. Collapse onto your bed and kick the useless textbook all the way to the end. And you get emotional.

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .  
For weeks I have told myself everything was better. The turning over of a new leaf. In this moment: it's the same leaf, it's always the same _fucking_ leaf. I'm right back where I started: fighting, groveling, having breakdowns over menial disagreements. I'm disappointed in myself. I don't think I can even bring myself to tell Su. I want to. I feel like she’d find a way to help me, if I did. But I can’t. 

I try to power through, in more than one sense, with all the endurance of someone who has spent the last years of their life doing just that. I try.

There’s a hand on my shoulder as I mount the steps to the performing arts building, thoughts a jumbled mess of the previous night. Most prominently among this complete haystack of my mind, how to explain to Su I can’t talk to her anymore.

I wish it wouldn’t, but my heart sinks the second I turn around. It briefly comes to mind how numb I’ve gone to knowing how his hands feel on my shoulders, or that I might run into him, on his way to swim practice.

“Hey.” it’s clear he hasn’t thought this through.

“Hey.”

“Um, I needed to tell you--” He threads his fingers together, index fingers coming up against his bottom lip. “Mel told me, actually, if I ran into you, you know, since we never...see you...anymore, otherwise.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, God, I think it’s stupid. So since her birthday’s coming up, she’s kind of having a party, except it’s not a party, really, it’s just alcohol and probably drugs of all kinds, and she wants you to come.”

It still makes me smile. He looks at the ground. I’d forgotten how wild my friends were.

_“Drugs?”_

“She’s found connections.” He growls, looking up at me from lowered eyes. “Please go. Keep her in check. I have work, Kuvira, please I can’t do it. I can’t be there the whole time.”

It’s the unspoken knowledge of the fact that Mel and illegal activity don’t mix that brings on this plea. I recognize it, for sure. He gives me a date, a general time frame, and I’m almost through when I fuck it up for myself.

“I may be busy.” I say, ignoring his sudden look. “Just a heads up, because I’m not sure.”

He sighs, runs a hand back through some of his messy hair, and, under his breath:

“I expected as much.”

“What does that mean?” It’s too snappy, but I hardly acknowledge that, and become aware instead of how the toe of his shoe scuffs against the bottom step in his shyness.

“It’s only that you never hang out with us anymore. It’s just an observation, don’t take it the wrong way. I don’t like it, okay? I don’t.” 

And I listen. I take it like a lecture, something I should take from heart to heart.  
“I'm-I’m not saying you should adapt for...for my sake, or Mel’s. I-I’m just...putting it out there, you know. It's how I feel.” He finishes with a front of resolution, putting his hands back in his pockets and raising his chin in my direction.

I don't know what to say. I feel like shit. But at the same time, she's probably waiting for me, and I...

“I'm sorry.”

“It's okay. I just wanted you to know how I felt. I release you.”

So I tell him goodbye, and I go to practice. 

I expect her to say something about performing at our dumb festival, at least let everyone know that’s on the table, but I watch her the whole two hours and she never says a word. Then she tells me to stay after. It's more combat training, like I'm her side project, she tells me.

“Are you still planning on that thing for the arts festival?”

She looks up, mouth open, and it reminds me vaguely of myself, asked for a school assignment.

“I’m…” But she pulls it together, points at me and finishes with confidence, before dropping back into our frozen stance. “...definitely _working_ on it”

“Does that mean it's not going well?”

“I've certainly underestimated how much effort goes into designing something like this. Especially for...a group of not entirely professionals.” Her shoulders relax, hands dropping slightly in front of her as she responds.

I go in so fast I can hardly keep up mentally, but my hand already clamps down on her arm, already twists us around until I hear the small intake of breath, indicative of pain, and my grip on her slackens instinctively.

And it's not seconds later that I feel my feet knocked out from under me, and I go crashing onto the mat, rolling onto my back to stare up, open-mouthed at her.

“You play so dirty.”

“I play however I want to.” She smirks, holds out her hand, which I don't need, but decide to take anyways. “It's not exactly that you play any cleaner, now, is it?”

We start to wrap up, go our separate ways. A few passing words are said, nothing of importance, but then--

“You haven't said anything about how things are at home.”

I stop, hands on my bag but not lifting it, like suddenly my muscles are jello. So close. Damn her.

“Usual.”

I don't look at her. 

“Kuvira the _usual_  
isn’t very good.” I straighten up, dragging my bag onto my shoulder, and am faced with her: arms tightly folded, eyes big and _glaring_ my way. A concerned glaring, but glaring all the same.

“I don't mean that. It's just that there hasn't been much happening.” And I've lied.

I've lied. And for what? It just comes out. We stare at each other like that, until my face starts to feel warm and I look away.

“Have the two of you been fighting?”

“No.”

Another long glance, and she disappears once again into her office.

“Hey, how do you feel about tagging?” My hand freezes on the doorknob.

“And where the hell is this coming from?” I turn, laughing, and let it go, walk back over as she pokes her head around the door, hair falling from where it’s been pulled back since this morning.

“Well, see I found all my paint a few days ago, from when I used to do it a lot--don’t look at me like that--and even with all my preparations for this performance, I still have a lot of time on my hands, and I started thinking, what with all our excursions lately, we could do something…” She gapes for a second, looks at the ceiling. “...artistic.”

I’m in awe, and one hundred percent sure that it shows, what with the relentless way she glues her face onto mine, searching for my response before I can get it out.

“A-and what is it that you plan on tagging?”

“The train.”

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

So within the next forty-eight hours, I find myself an uneasy teenager piled into a jaguar with a duffel bag full of questionably-usable spray paint, a flashlight the size of my head, and the love of my life: an anarchist, polygamist aerial arts coach who probably thinks she’s just the _coolest._

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .  
“What are we painting?” I can’t contain the laugh as she drops the bag in front of us in the long grass, the cans all clanking together in the silence.

She looks up at me, eyes bright in the darkness, kicks the bag between us, and drops down to tear the thing open with a harsh _zip_. It’s not until she comes back up, brandishing what looks like the worn label once named as white, one to each hand, that she opens her mouth once more. I get the impression she hasn’t spared this a single passing thought, especially as she steps back, behind me, fully armed, and stares into the side, expression blank.

“Well, I don’t know _yet.”_

I realize I’ve been watching her, but I don’t stop myself, because she doesn’t seem to care, or even notice, for that matter. I wait, instead, until the silence and sounds of the crickets melts into the clicking of the can being shaken up, the spray of paint across metal.

It’s amazing, watching her. I never knew she could do this, and to watch her work like this, obviously deep in concentration, bottom lip so slightly pulled between her teeth and making her stoic frown all the more intense. She holds out the can she’s not using without a word, and I take it. Like we talk inside each other’s heads, I watch her, I follow, and soon enough the sound of our paint fills the air, the normal sounds of life drowned out in artistry, each monotone spray indicative of another addition to the canvas, a blade of grass, a distant skyline. She sketches out the first one, I move closer, add in one to it’s side, until the flashlight she’s balanced on the roof just so it illuminates the canvas dies and, in the space of a second, there’s a great black expanse in front of us instead of a great white diagram against rusted metal.

I’m hovering under her when it does, kneeling on the grass with can inches from the surface. At the arrival of darkness, I stop, no words present to roll off my tongue. SIlence. And then a laugh, quiet and involuntary, as she moves above me, retrieves the flashlight, and drops her can in the open bag beside us. And just like it started, it’s over.

“We’ll come back to this.”

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .  
It’s not for a week that I see the train again, leaving one night as the house is emptied with passing words of being back tomorrow, there’s food in the fridge, and no more than a glance my way before the door swings closed a mile behind. 

She’s brought batteries this time.  
“Do you ever...you know, think about us?”

I manage to slip out a sentence, as if it will break uncomfortable silence. If anything the pause before her response is enough to show me how incorrect that notion was. It’s vague, giving me room still to gauge a reaction, but there’s no need for that. She looks up, hand still buried in the duffel bag on the grass beside us, frozen. Like I’m the cops. But it’s only for a second, and before I can panic to my full extent, she jumps on it as readily as ever.

“Of course I do, all the time.”

“Really?” I can’t hold back a slight smile, which would be of no matter if I had only looked at her when she said it, squinting down in deep contemplation over two different shades of green. I can’t tell if this is best, that I decide to do this when she’s so distracted.

“Really...I mean,” she looks up here, dropping one of the cans back down, it clanking metallically against the others. “I think about the future more than you may imagine. Me, the poster child of living in the present.”

“I’m familiar with the poster.”

“What I mean to say is...” She stops, directing the next few words towards the metal in front of her. “I like you. You’re like a child to me, in a way. And then you’re going to graduate, in only a couple of months, and it’s going to kill me. In a good way. I mean I’m prepared to cut back on a lot of late-night sneaking-outs, and I’m rambling, and…” 

There’s a pause, filled with really nothing except silence, the spray of paint where she redirects her awkward attention.

“It’s cute.”

She shoots me a pathetic, forced look filled with faux anger, useless and obviously so.

“It’s _not.”_

I have to stop, think about what I intend to say. A single, deep breath is all I need. I know what to say. I do.

“I don’t know how I’m going to make it without you. You’re like…” Finding it suddenly difficult, I start closing in, start to stop myself. “Everything. You’re everything to me.”

There are a few, insane seconds where I don’t quite know what I’ve done. Where I watch her, looking straight ahead, maybe thinking, maybe not. Her arm still raised in the motion of drawing, stopping, finger still firm on the trigger, then dropping away, thoughtlessly, leaving a long, white streak down the side of the car.

It feels like I’m stuck, as she kind of turns towards me at that, face no longer empty but full of surprise suddenly, even though it strikes me--I don’t exactly know what at. Did she expect anything less, at this point?

My heart definitely does something unnatural when she looks at me, and I start panicking just a bit at that. It’s a soft panic, since I somehow feel calm, unrushed, composed, but unable to deny the fluttering of my heart underneath all of that solid ground, the second she steps forward. It carries on like this until we come at arms length, follows through the motion of her hand, coming up to my shoulder...there's a moment where I’m not entirely sure what’s next, but, like all things, she decides that, moves away. Looks back up at the car as if in wonderment, narrows her eyes and inspects it for a second, can of paint dangling at her fingers.

“You feel that way?” She directs it at the train, and, with her analytical stare and unmoving stance, it does seem more that way than if she meant it for me to answer.

“Well, of course.” I say, without thinking. It comes out too sarcastic and gross, but there isn’t any going back and I know it. 

The rest of the night is a blur. I remember going home as a distant dream, the next day too. I know I see my mom, I know she comes in, but I don't go downstairs to see her, and she doesn't come upstairs to see me. Just like a ghost, she's manifested and faded back out of my life. And I don't care. And then he leaves for work, an overnight job he picked up when mom stopped bringing income to the table, and I'm at the phone.

“I'm free”

_“Already?”_

“Until about six in the morning.”

 _“You're wanting to work on the train, aren't you?”_  
“Nothing else to do. Are you busy?”

 _“Nooo.”_  
“When do you think you'll be here?”

_“Oh, half an hour. Let me check in before I go running off for the indefinite future.”_

And I'm free. I’m actually still braiding my hair up, if only to keep it out of my way--not because she said something once about how nice it looked braided, as much of it as I have--when there's a knock at my door and I get the shit scared out of me. I think it's him, and if he sees me-- but he wouldn't knock.

“You gave me a heart attack” is all that comes out when I open the door. She just shrugs, hands in pockets, and smiles in the way that I have to walk away from, lest I have an actual heart attack.

“I didn't see any cars in the driveway.” She follows me back inside. “I'm sorry.”

“It's fine, I just panicked.” Her eyes travel around silently, and I'm going back up the stairs to get my jacket, trying not to think about her being in my house. What she must think of the place. But when I come back down and she's staring at the wall, I can't help smiling. Just because I know the only picture on that wall, and I know what causes her eyes to get all big, unbeknownst of the fact that I see her. But it's over, and the second I shut my door she's back, walking towards the door.

“Come on, I forgot to tell you we’re not alone.”

‘What?”

She stalls, like me. Doesn't look at me, traces the edge of the table with a finger, gazes around the visible rest of the house. 

“Who else?”

“Huan.”

Her son. She’s bringing her _son_ to our thing. I start beating myself up for that making me feel like it does.

“Now don't look at me like that. He's an artist, he wanted to see it. He may even help a bit, god knows we need all we can get.”

“I know.”

The Huan I remember from the photos in her glovebox, the Huan with the cats and the deep stares is slumped across the seats when I get onto the pathway, toying with a lighter and running his thin fingers through the flame.

I guess I had assumed that the kid in all those photos was a girl. There’s a few moments of piecing together, but I conclude that I was simply...incorrect. Nothing else to it. He looked so much like one in all those photos, I… Maybe it was the long hair.

He’s lost the long hair in question, which now falls in his face, choppy and messy in the kind of way that works with the baggy shirt, the ripped jeans. Gangly, kind of awkward with a certain calmness about him that makes him seem observant beyond his years--even while playing with fire, feet up on the dashboard. He reminds me vaguely of his brother, still in my class, still placid and watching.

He looks at me, as we’re walking back, and catches me off guard with his eyes, the same shade of green. Even as she motions towards him and he slides back into the space behind the front seats, lighter still open and flickering.

I’m still so fascinated that I’m caught unawares when she flings open the door, reaches in and snatches the lighter out of his skinny hand so fast I see him looking down at his empty palm before looking back at her. 

“You _pickpocketed_ me?” She snaps, shoving it back in her pocket before starting the car.

“Maybe I did.” He shrugs just like her, matches her look, so numb to her efficacy.

It hits me too suddenly, and I even open my mouth back at her as I’m getting in, but she waves it off with a simple sentence.

“It’s fine, he knows.” They kind of look at each other, a silent challenge that I swear is visible. “Somehow he’s found control of all my darkest secrets.”

“It’s true.”

She pulls all the way up, into the trees, like the idea of flat tires isn’t hardly prominent in processes of her mind, and I feel Huan’s breath on my neck as we come close, his body leaning into the seat.

“So that’s it.”

“That’s it.”

I may watch him a little too intently, but the way he focuses on our travestial tagging is fascinating, to say the least. He’s an artist, she said, but a critic…

“It’s definitely very traditional.” He covers his mouth with a hand, eyebrows pulling down in concentration as he steps through the grass, plants himself a few feet away, still analyzing. I trail behind, bag of paint on my shoulder.

“That was the plan.”

“Chinese.”

“Yep.”

“The lotus are great focal points. Positioned in the right place, and everything. Even the colors worked out.”

“We were aiming for something along those lines.” 

I’m still stunned by the sheer amount of technical knowledge he seems to possess, the demeanour itself of this boy that seems to be younger than me by at least a few years. Fifteen, I ask and he takes his hand away long enough to answer, eyes unmoving.

As we unload, start to settle ourselves into the progress, he retreats, fishing a small leather book out of the back of the Jag, holds it in one hand as he slinks up the ladder, then perches on the very end and opens it, raising his head to the trees. And stays there, as we work, until the sun melts down into the hills and he closes it, falling backwards onto the roof soundlessly. But by that time we’ve been working for at least an hour, and the stream of music coming from the car radio has needed to be changed out twice, and Su already has a cigarette.

"Can I ask you something?"

“Of course.” I at least wish she would act like she’s expectant. A tiny bit prepared. How she would be isn’t there in my mind.

“It’s really stupid.”

“That’s okay.”

I have a plan.

“What am I supposed to do if I’ve realized I’m in love with someone and it’s destroying me slowly from the inside out?”

There’s a pause, immaculate silence. I can feel her looking up at me, can basically taste her expression, a little surprised, maybe.

“Oh, just tell them.” She bends down and picks out a new color, does some shading with it. It’s such a simple sentence, and tells me better than anything that she hasn’t caught on yet. Fuck. “That’s usually best.”

“And what if the person in question is...not right for you?”

She laughs at this, in the way that might make me feel inferior to her, but doesn’t.

“I don’t think Jesus Christ himself could be defined as “right”. If you ask me, unless this person is unhealthy for you, I’d say go for it. Can’t be that bad, can it?”

She’s basically giving me green lights, but I still can’t help but feel like I shouldn’t. Anyways, that takes a back seat immediately, since now my instinct is to call her out.

“You really think there is no right person?” Maybe I’m subconsciously pushing myself away from fessing up, maybe I’m legitimately curious. Well, of course I’m legitimately curious. No point in trying to deny that.

“You do?”

“I think that some are better than others”

I’m familiar with the look that flashes over her face, the expectant smile, the soft twitch of her smirk that still does little things inside of me.

“Of course you do.” She turns back, stepping away to gaze up at what we’ve made as analytical as if it could be a battle plan. “And for the record I do, if that’s what you mean, believe in soulmates.”

“But aren’t you…”

“Doesn’t matter. I also believe in “soulmates” as a concept that does not always entail…” She motions with the cigarette, creating a circle of smoke that rises high into the darkness. “Romance.”

“How completely philosophical of you.”

There are shared smiles, we just go back to it without another word. I look up, see the lump of boy that used to be Huan, curled up and unmoving.

“Do you think, in that case…” She raises an eyebrow.

“--us?”

“Yeah.”

“Too soon to tell. I think I...well, that’s not the point, is it?” She looks back up at me as if catching herself, catching us going too deep and instead of being surprised and awkward, deflects it as easily as if I had been tricking her into confessing something unsavory. I wish she would have kept going. I have to turn back to my side of the train to hide my disappointment.

“I say tell them.” She adds in finally, resolute. “Get it off your chest.”

Single, deep breath. Don’t do this to yourself. To her. For what you have here--this pure, innocent relationship.

“What if, in doing so, I just happen to ruin everything?”

“Don’t worry about that, it will make you feel better just so say something.”

“But what if it’s--” The last word catches in the back of my throat, like it knows better than I do how bad of an idea this is, and the real “you” comes out as no more than a whisper.

Apparently the growing frenzy I can just feel rising in my face like a bad sunburn isn’t enough, since her next words are low, and wavering. The way her eyes narrow hints at a caution I’ve never witnessed about her. I can’t believe how quickly her disposition has changed.

“What exactly does that mean?”

“Nothing, I guess.”

“Kuvira.”

“I’m in love with you.”

And It comes back again. I wait just like that, hand braced against the background I had been fleshing out, not daring to look at her, but still noticing the gradual melt, back into character, back to normal. The cold front, ended. I watch out of the corner of my eye as she grinds out the end of her cigarette directly on one of our lotus, shoving it into her pocket with an unreadable look.

“It’s understandable for you to jump to…”

“No, like I am definitely in _love_ with you. I can’t get you out of my head. I don’t _want_ you out of my head, I--” 

There’s silence. Disgusting, infinite silence.

“I feel like I was meant to expect this.”

All I can hear is her sigh, all I can see the way she looks at the ground, tosses her can into the bag between us. Mounting the ladder at the side of the car, disappearing for a few seconds, giving me time to pack the rest of our scattered cans back in the bag and sling it over my shoulder.

I don’t feel her eyes on me as we all pile into the Jag once again, don’t hear except for the soft snoring from directly behind me. I think I should be feeling things. I don’t think I know what I’m supposed to feel.

“I'm sorry.” But it comes out shaky, and unsure, and although she turns my way, I feel my stomach cinch up into knots under the stoic intensity she has adopted, until she looks away once again. 

“Don’t apologise.”

We pull over, three blocks from the house, and in the light of a flickering streetlamp, I catch the pained expression shadowing her face in all the right places.

I don't believe I even know what she says, or realize anything, for that matter, after that moment, except that she moves closer. Finds me. Suddenly all I'm aware of is the incapability of my hands to return the hug pressing into my shoulders. Then a few whispered words, something I say back, eager to end it, and my forehead igniting in a fire where she kisses it. 

‘Nineteen years is just a bit too much not to consider, alright?”

“I know. I know that. I just...I wanted it off my conscience.”

“I'm sorry if I overreacted a bit.”

“I'll see you later, right?”

There's rustling from behind us and we both freeze. She nods, then whispers back, barely audible.

“We’ll work on this. A phase, baby. It’s a phase. It’ll pass, just remember that.”

Then why, hours, days later, am I still the same? Still waiting, still searching in the dark for hands, fingertips whispering against cold sheets as if I could deceive myself into thinking there was something there. Something nonexistent. Something incapable of being there at all.

A phase. But it’s been phases. It’s been realization, acceptance, denial, more realization--I’ve gone through the entire cycle of the moon and if I were to deny--well, there would only be a matter of time before I ended up right where I began.

“Is that okay?” I ask her as she shakes her head around a cigarette. “I know...that things would be better, if they were different, but that’s just...not the case.”

“I guess so.” Her hand, cigarette held away, passes over her eyes, then hangs suspended as she turns back towards me. “What’s up with you tonight? Is it something to do with him?”

In fact, it is. In fact, he yelled so loudly today that I cried.

“It’s fine.” I laugh, drier than the river we look out at. “Nothing anyone needs to worry about, for sure. Just...being a regular asshole.”

I reach over, play with the dial, click through the tracks, leaving it on something I can’t remember the name of. Some old song from probably twenty years ago, that makes me feel calm, so I leave it on.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

She reaches up, and a soft click lights everything up in a blinding yellow glow. And then I realize she’s looking at me under it, catching me like a criminal in the searchlights, just to make sure I’m not crying. I bite my lips together, and when a hand creeps up my shoulder, there’s a shiver that razes down my spine.

“Vira.”

I have to force myself to look at her, and the way the stupid light freckles dotting her forehead raise when she arches an eyebrow, adding in a pillow-fluff soft voice;

“There’s something else. I can tell.”

Maybe it is just that, after all. She’s getting to me, getting in deep, again. It’s fucking me up worse than I can tell, that’s all. Not you. Not you, and your stupid face that makes me want to punch things, and kiss you all over.

So I sigh, laugh a bit. Act puerile and gross and too much like Mel, to much of what she should expect of me. At some point I do get my answer out, amid all of that fluff.

“Maybe I’m just crazily, unimaginably in love.”

That’s still sinking in, forming a little ball of anger in the center of my stomach, when I notice she smirks, but it falls just as soon as it shows up, before I can fill myself with false hope. She chooses seriousness to fix upon me in its place, and I’m left once again with the little ball of anger. How inappropriate, to feel anger.

“I told you we could talk about this, remember?”

“Yeah, and I-I know, it’s just--” Her hand starts to squeeze my shoulder, and I break apart. “It’s just _hard_.”

“I know.”

Can she know? Can this be something that she...she knows? No, not her. I look back in confusion, at her, leaning over still to face me, slight, sympathetic smile playing over her lips as her thumb runs in rhythmic circles over my shoulder blade. Doesn’t she know?

“You’ll move on.”

“But what if I’m not?” I turn back towards her, leaning down until we’re face to face. Making my voice firm, steady. Serious as I can manage. “What if I don’t even want to?”

She starts to shake her head, but I continue before she can edge in a single word. I’m a mess. I hate being a mess. Everything seems like on big, unavoidable, mess. And If I need to dive in to come out the other side, I decide that I’ll do it.

“I wish I could, honestly, I do. But I can’t, at the same time. I just don’t have the desire to _ever give up_ ” She holds my gaze this time, and I focus, on her eyes. They’re the same, securing green. “I can’t do it, Su, I just can’t. Not when I don’t want to. I know I’m never going to have you, but that’s not going to stop me.”

“Why won’t it?”

“I’m in too deep.”

She shakes her head, slowly, and when she does speak again, her tone is harsher, maybe a bit more frustrated, but hardly so.

“What do you want?”

“What do you mean?”

“What is it that you want? What are you trying to give up? What exactly are you dealing with here? Work with me, please?”

Everything. I’d be giving up everything. Silent, I just kind of sit there, not even aware of how she waits for my answer.

“Kuvira what do you want, right now?”

Not now. Now, everything is pressing together, compressing around me until I think I am concealed inside a tiny bubble with barely room to breathe. Her hand on my shoulder feels like it’s crushing me.

“Come on.”

“Right now?”

“This exact moment.”

“You don’t want to hear that.”

“I do. You know that I do.”

“I think it’s the normal things.” my hands are weird, too thin, my blisters hardened. “Want to stop being ashamed of staring at you, want to know what it would feel like to kiss you.”

I don’t know what I expect. Her to be so repulsed by me saying it out loud she kicks me out right here and now. To be surprised, even. Jesus, it’s obvious, isn’t it? The corner of her mouth twitches up as it might form a smirk, but doesn’t. It sticks, right there, and her eyes move away. My mind spins like a game show wheel comprised of responses she could be about to make. 

Her hand comes off of my shoulder, and everything seems to sink. I think her letting go can destroy me, if I’m fucked up enough at the time. I think I’m pretty fucked up right now.

But then it’s back, back this time, and I don’t even get time to think. I don’t get time to comprehend what it is that’s going on except one second everything is gone, and then it’s there. Soft, powerful, a train crashing, but slowly, gently, somehow, as if wound down with slow motion. That’s what it feels like, her lips against mine, soft, but full of some force that radiates through me like a seismic wave, and holds me riveted like that for either half a second or an eternity. And all I remember in that moment is that I don’t know how she got there, when it would seem she was miles away just seconds before.

She moves, then, a centimeter away, and breathes slowly, until I have the will to open my eyes and see her there, off guard. Just barely there, and then not at all. The tape wound back, each of us retreating back away from the collision, free of the exploding harm, then barreling back down the track in our respective directions.

I fall back against the seat without even realizing, until I’m there. I don’t dare look beside me, but I do see her reach under the seat and come up with something in her hand. The snap of the lighter sparking, the scent filling the cab, slowly making me aware, aware of senses that exist outside the boundary of _her_.

She falls back against the seat like she’s crashing back to the surface of the earth, the sound of fabric against leather signaling her descent, all the way down. her arms folding and never taking the cigarette an inch from her face. And then she turns the car back on. And then we’re already back outside my house.

I glance once at her, not a single word exchanged between us, and lay my hand on the door. She’s gripping the wheel with both hands, a giant neon sign that there’s something seriously wrong, since it’s a good day that I get to see her use one. I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. I think I know it’s my fault, all of it. My fault this has happened, my fault she’s like this. The door swings open. 

The window on her side scrolls down at the same time, and she hardly diverts her eyes from the void in front of her to let the butt of her cigarette fall from her fingers onto the curb.

“That’s not very environmentalist of you.”

“Kuvira.”

I look back at her one last time, anxious to catch some hint of any emotion in her face, but am met with essentially the same feeling as a brick wall. A gorgeous, freckled, brick wall.

“Are we not talking?”

“I expect unbroken silence, but she sighs, desperately, as if she’s been holding it in for too long, raising her fingertips to her mouth as if in regret of already wasting her one cigarette.

“Are you--”

“Not now, okay? I just need…” She runs a hand back through her hair, still wide-eyed and staring into nothing. “I just need to think. Just for a little time, that’s all. It’s okay.”

It’s okay. It’s okay. I love her for saying that, for waiting to say that at the end. I love her--that’s a different matter. But I do end up repeating that, over, and over, in my head, all night. Maybe it is. Maybe so, since she said it and she’s never lied to you. Never. It’s okay. Just a little time.

But already the next morning she’s there, pulling up to the sidewalk smoothly the second I step outside, and watches me, as I notice her and freeze, letting the door swing shut carelessly.

She motions me over, leaning forward to get my attention better, and I free fall off the top step into oblivion.

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

“I just wanted to clear things up.” Bringing in a flurry of cold air, I try to swing inside as fast as possible, but she doesn’t show any reaction to the sudden cold. She barely wastes a second, not even allowing me to adjust to the ambient warmth that always arrives with her presence. It’s something in the air, something that isn’t forgotten air fresheners in the floorboard, or even the all-too rich scent of smoke for someone that shouldn’t have laid a finger on a cigarette since last night. I know it immediately, but don’t recognize it, not until she’s already set the car in reverse. Crushes me back, gently, lovingly, but with enough force to break me in half. She doesn’t mean to. 

“And I wanted to do it as soon as possible.”

I respond with a glance, and she smiles back, too soon, too warmly, but God does it help. Melts away the ice choking up my bloodstream.. Even if her budding fictitiousness turns me off just a bit. She’s uptight. I’ve made her uptight.

“So.” She turns back, transitioning smoothly back into seriousness with a sigh. “About last night.”

“I--”

“I made an extremely rash and childish decision back there, and I just want you to know...I...I’m taking full blame for that and...and possible...repercussions.”

“What...repercussions?”

Something seems to twist into this, a steel wire cutting into our cottony sugarcoating, and suddenly it’s suffocating. Her lips press together, as if she’s trying to hold back all the repercussions in question from spilling out, as badly as she wants to let them. As if she’s afraid of letting out what this means. I know what it means, I don’t need her to torture us over it.

She sighs again, a desperate release of the sudden crushing atmosphere surrounding the both of us. I feel as if there has been a sudden influx of carbon dioxide. And suddenly I also feel that I’d like to spring out of here, the only place I’ve ever truly felt calm, coming around to pull her out by the end of her stupid scarf before we both die from the poison spilling from the vents.

But still, she goes on. Somehow, I don’t know how.

“I thought...Somehow I think I just thought...if I just gave you, something, _anything_ , that maybe it would help. I realized all too soon how incorrect i was, of course, that it could only ever....”

I had never given myself any hope. It made this...it made this alright. Because I expected it, so that when she tells me that she didn’t mean anything by kissing me, I can just nod along and everything will be alright.

“Okay.” I guess it’s alright. That’s fine.

She drives as if stuck in time. A place where this scene must play out in it’s entirety before the two of us get anywhere but a state of limbo. Strangely enough, an indefinite time I must spend with her in that situation seems oddly...cloying. Today, at least.

“You’ve been…cauterized, in a manner of speaking?” She skims over the words, as if they’ve been thought over so thoroughly contemplated they fall out without consideration, a reflex. But it’s been so long since she’s spoken that it still catches me by surprise, and I almost have to ask her to repeat the point. But I do respond this time, and the honesty of it troubles me as she cringes in a minute twitch a blink could have me miss.

“In a way.”

“Alright.”

“I appreciate the metaphor.” I smirk as I look back at her, and for a second a smile creeps back across her features. “Burns, but not exactly an open wound anymore. That’s deep.”

“You said it, not me.”

There’s a pause, another one. Not as harsh, however. I may even enjoy it.

“I never intended to...burn you, I hope you know that.” Pause. “I will never, try to take control of your feelings again. And if you can’t forgive me for when I did--I’ll take it. I fucked up pretty bad. That’s on me.”

“How could I just not forgive you?”

“Because I’ve damaged you.”

“And you think you’re the first to? It;s just that I have trouble getting over you, is all.”

“I’m sorry I’m so incredible.” She says it quietly, because she knows how to make me smile, and it works.

“Shut up.”

“I’m genuinely apologetic for all of this.”

“You aren’t…” I can’t even go on. How could I?

March is a single cup that washes over my life, falling down in a wave, and then gone as soon as it came. All she talks about is choreography, and soon enough our loftier, at times philosophical conversations over cans of spray paint take a back seat to her incessant rants about everything from how to try people out for the parts, to convincing the big guys to rig up silks on stage.

“Stay after practice tomorrow.”

I lean over, to check if I’ve shaded my flowers the same as hers, before going back to my side.

“For what?”

“Well, there’s this part, in the routine. I kind of need to see what it’s like, if it’s possible even. I was wondering if you’d help...with that?” 

I tell her I will. She continues her ranting, arms working around our canvas, eyes focused. I feel bad for liking how she talks when she’s like this. How her words get jumbled, bumping into one another like train cars running off a track, giving the impression that she can’t keep up with how fast her mind works. I’m supposed to be getting over her.

The first thing that happens as I enter her office, after we are left alone, is a sizeable stack of...notebook paper(?) that is slapped against my chest, that I have little choice but to hold onto as she takes her hand away and returns to the concealed computer screen.

“First off, skim through that.” 

“Hardly skimming material.” I laugh, flipping through the stack, full of her scribbles, sketches filling the margins, entire lines crossed out in some places. She dismisses me under her breath, and I fall down into the chair pushed against the wall. She wants two people for a part, she doesn’t know how it will go. It’s only natural that I go through it with her, be it involving a degree of physical contact or no.

The routine itself isn’t sensual. And the other things, a steady hand on someone’s thigh, hands traveling free range to discover the easiest holds--strictly professional. Even if the duet is borderlining intimacy, there’s also the assurance that this is only platonic. Even as her hands slide across the tight fabric of my shirt, something wraithlike in how I’m aware of her hands on me.

“How do you feel?”

“It’s possible. Beautiful, but still possible.”

We stop, starting to climb down, carefully as you always have to be, lest you lose your grip and fall, break something.

“I mean, it probably is. Not that I know shit of what any of that looks like.” I’m only somewhat aware of her watching me as I set down on the ground. I look up, only to see her sputtering into laughter. 

“I don’t either. I’ll have to find someone to learn the part so that I can play judge.”

 

“Parts.”

And she gives me this look. Not questioning, not even suggestive. It’s this perfect, half smile, eyebrow raised and everything, that lights up her entire face in this amazing image of deviousness.

“What--no. No.”

“Yes.”

She wants me to perform. It’s not favouritism, or even merely an attempt at payback for punching me in the heart, and I know it. And that’s almost really why I decide I  
do it.

“I can’t”

“Vira you’re already so familiar with the part--and you’re really just perfect--I’ll bump your grade up, please?”

“I have an A.” I laugh, adding tentatively, “Idiot.”

“Well, then I’ll lower it if you say no.”

“You can’t do that.”

It’s almost a challenge, that she takes readily, folding her arms and pouting almost perfectly. 

“Well, think about it, at least. Someone of your skill and…” She stops, waving an arm up and down in my direction before continuing. “...build is perfect for the role and the moves you would be executing.”

“My build?”

“You know what I mean.” I decide I’m not going to pretend that I don’t feel the pounding of my heart when those wide, beautiful eyes run the length of my body. “You’re strong enough to do the part, but graceful, limber. You’re basically perfect.” Fuck.

Fuck.

“And now I need to go, because it’s nine and I’m not supposed to be here, let alone you.”

“Yeah...yeah.”

“Please consider it.” She still pauses, hanging on just to stare me in the eye, arms still crossed in defense.

“Okay.” She smiles that perfect, golden smile, and walks away. Leaving me a wreck.

I would have imagined I’d stopped by by now.

I haven’t, not as I follow her, grabbing my bag from the floor and moving to brace myself in the doorway to her office as I slip on my shoes. Not when she turns her back to me, pulling her shirt over her head smoothly. Not as I pretend to focus on my shoelaces, counting the freckles pooled over her lower back before she throws on a new one and I look down at the ground again.

“Wait for me, okay? Don’t just run off like last time.” She looks over her shoulder at me eyebrows raised. I’d forgotten that..our last rehearsal I spent alone with her, when it was so hard to face her I had booked it before I could get entangled once more in her adamancy to give me rides.

 

“I didn’t run off, I told you I was going.”

“--and ran off before I could convince you to let me drive you.”

Silent as she crams an assortment of papers into a single folder, I come upright slowly, meeting her stare steadily. Not expecting her to come over, stepping lightly to my side and presenting the most golden of questions.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah. Yeah, just...tired.”

“All healed up?”

Healed.

I’m formulating some snarky rebound when something brushes up against my sleeve, and when I look down, her surprisingly cool, strong fingers reach around my wrist, sliding between my own. Is this healed?

I look up, expecting but not getting the silent, sympathetic support I’ve become so used to at this time. Really I...I don’t get much of anything. A few seconds pass and our eyes come back together, and I see nothing of that. Wild, bright, but soft and yielding, and I’m losing myself in them, suddenly lost and confused in a pool of nothing but space, until she moves back and the waves wash up the shore at my head.

She moves past me, and I’m collecting myself, tightening all the seams when the lights go black, the blue glow of the computer screen turning ambient and transforming the walls creepily spacey. I’m definitely lost in orbit somewhere out here, my mind running circles around her but forbidden to get any closer.

And it hits me.

At first what “it” is is just a bit fuzzy, a smattering of the last minute or so, things I should have noticed but didn’t--but then it’s not, she comes closer, breaking the field pulling us apart in an instant, our foreheads touching, and oh god it’s not. 

I kiss her. Nothing else for me to do. And I kiss her exactly like she kissed me, softly, tenderly if it’s possible for me to do so. Cautiously. And pull away, watch her eyes half-opening and looking away, voice low and urgent. As if this is the fate of her world.

“Do it again.” As if I need to be told, as if I ever will--If I had to give someone up, it should never have had to be someone so damn efficacious. 

“Aren’t there cameras in here?”

“It’s too dark.”

We connect like magnets, puzzle pieces, pre-cut to fit. It’s not innocent, it’s not sweet, this time. Everything is intense, fervent, growing, her hands on my face gentle but firm, tongue slipping inside my mouth, holding us in place like we might fall if she doesn’t. My fingers in the dark, thick mess of her hair, dragging it out of its hold and wrapping it around my fingers, her back hitting the wall when I’ve unknowingly pushed us so slightly forward. 

It’s a dream. Something I’ve imagined in the safeguard of my own mind, watching her from a distance, or laying in bed at night. Not...for real.

Real, or not, she doesn’t tell me to stop, so I don’t. I keep going, and lose myself in little fragments all over the linoleum, a trip that I know will leave me hurting in the future, in classes and the middle of the street, in sleepless nights. A trip that I want to wake from, but can’t not with the way this feels, the warm shade of her eyes, opened only after we pull back, looking back at me, assuring herself. Hands, strong, beautiful, dropping from my face at some point, pulling my wrists down so my hands run over her chest, the rigid line of her collarbones through the fabric of her shirt. It turns switches in my mind I don’t mess with, don’t mess with even when-- _especially_ when it comes to her.

And then, almost as if she’s planned it, she just stops. Leans away, lets my hands fall from her grasp at the same time I jerk them back, not anxious to look clingy.

“I’m sorry.” It sounds hesitant, too illegitimate, and still she looks up to assure me I didn’t do anything wrong.

Something snaps. Like a rubber band, the tension just goes--and reverberates off the skin, stinging sharply and harshly. I don’t feel it. I’m just stuck there, glued onto the floor like a display, all stripped open and awkward, and nothing coming out.

I see things snap down against her and only her, and how she bites down on her lip hard, the deep breathing as she turns away, trying to gather something, anything. Hand coming up and clamping down over her mouth, so I can see how her eyes squeeze shut over her fingers.

It’s so weird, and so wrong, wronger it seems, than if we had ended up having sex or something right there in the doorway--because I don’t know how to handle this, I don’t know how to handle any of it. I don’t handle it, I don’t even try, and it comes back in a throbbing burn, forgotten pain that returns after a while of numbness. Silent, pulsing, pain, in all its purity and harshness.

But I get through it, and she turns around, eventually, both hands half-outstretched, straight, and rigid, voice blunt, striving to be harsh, failing.

“I want this, I really do, and I’m hardly trying to deny that--but--” Surely she can see my eyes and how they go instantly wide as she faces me, because she looks back, catches my eye, continues. “But this doesn’t mean anything. Forget about this, that it ever happened. This is the extent of...this.”

Forget it. Like it would be that easy.

“You say it like it could be easy.”

“Kuvira I don’t _care_ if it’s easy or not--” She snaps, slipping back,still fluctuating between anger and compassion, but catches herself, still indecisive, “--We can’t do this. You understand that, right? If you do, please just do what I say. Don’t make this harder than it has to be."

“Of course I do.”

“Good. That was...that was so _many_ shades of sinful, I just...it wasn’t right. It really wasn’t. Jesus Christ that was really not okay”

I listen to this mantra as she turns her back to me, rustling paper in some half-assed manner to avoid my gaze, gathering things. I even wonder for a second if this is her...trying to assure herself.

“Then why did you let it happen?”

It just comes out, and while one half of me is trying to say that this really isn’t the time, I can’t help the little bubble of satisfaction that rises deep in my stomach when she stops dead in the middle of her attempt to collect herself, as little time as it lasts. Just a bubble. And it feels great.

“Why did I--”

“--Su you _know_ how I am! You know I’m not capable of holding back when it comes to these impossible situations you always seem to put me in! Don’t act like this is only _my_ fault--”

“Oh, you’re putting this on me.”

"I don’t know what you’re trying to do here! Is this so I can take the role for you, or something?” That makes her whip around, caught between astonishment and a remorseful seeming quasi-amusement.

“You actually think that was so I could get you to take the _role_ ?” And I hear something in the back of my head, reminding me...I have never seen this. Never seen this emotion. It’s stepping out into an unmarked minefield, no way of navigating the way she glares back. It’s not the anger she harbors for my father, or that she harbors for the government, or teachers she has to put up with at school. It’s different, and deeper than that, maybe because it’s me, or because of what I just did. 

“Would make sense.” Something deep within my consciousness flickers, becoming aroused, and before I can rethink, I just say it, my laugh sounding detached and forced as I do. “You could never...feel the same way as I do.” And God does it sound right. “A good part of me is starting to suspect this is you... furthering the process of wrapping me around your finger so I can just do whatever you like or something. An ulterior motive--”

“Ulterior--” I look up, and her sentence is cut off tangibly, replaced with silence and the simple expression on her face. I watch this, how she fades back, becomes flustered and struggling somewhere under the skin to justify the actions, settling finally into a resigned silence, eyes still widened and frowning intently.

“Would things by any chance be easier if I were to say there was?”

“I don’t know.” That catches her attention, bringing her back to me with the same innate concern that never fails to soften our arguments. I wish that it was simply for that purpose, that I don’t end the conversation there. That I say something like that--I wish that it was. But it’s not. It’s honesty, honesty that I cannot contain any better than she can her concern for me.

“Vira?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what would be better.”

She nods, looks at the floor.

I wonder if it could be the climate. Why the building is so crap, is filled with crap. You get used to the girls screeching over bugs that skitter across the floor in class, you find them smashed in hallways, legs splayed out against the linoleum. I see it out of the corner of my eye, wandering out from behind a file cabinet, and watch how she stares absent-mindedly at it, chin perched atop a single hand.

It seems that I wish she looked at it the same way as she looks at me, maybe it would...be easier, to assert my unimportance in her life. Easier, perhaps, to just let it go.. But things already shift into my mind, the way she did look at me, only minutes ago, like I was the singular thing in the world as opposed to insectan.

“Do you know?” My only response is a shrug. I start to feel something build up in my throat, a tiny chirp straining to break free.

“I think...that you do better than I.” Her hand doesn’t move from where it has traveled up to rest at her mouth, stifling the words as they come out. I know she waits for me to answer, so once the scream dies out, I say what my honesty tells myself is the right answer.

“It’s not. It wouldn’t be.”

Her hand drops at that, revealing a sad smile that tries it’s hardest to shake me of my opinion, not quite succeeding. 

“I was afraid of that.” But expected it.

“So what do we do?” There’s a pause.

”I’ll come around tomorrow night, if that’s alright? Maybe we can talk it over”

I nod. It’s all I feel capable of.And then I go home with her like normal, smile back when she waves through the car window, and lay in bed with my fingers on my lips, trying to keep a particular taste in my memory. It’s not even the memory of our argument that sticks, the memory of her anger towards me, the memory of things we both said. The expression on her face, the shock and the way her normally calm voice changed with her emotions. It’s that.

Twenty-seven hours, until I see her again. 

Twenty-six hours, between the memory of her lips against mine, her tongue in my mouth and my imminent downfall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is probably such a mess because ive been a mess hey please give me recognition this chapter is turning into hell on earth please make my shitty writing feel loved im so tired


	6. crystalline (part two)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the evil has been defeated

_Later_ , sticks in my throat and burns. Twenty-two hours, until I would see her again. As I go through the next day, I keep the countdown, go out to wait when night falls, and catch the dim headlights coming my way while I consider, perhaps for too long, laying out calmly in the street in front of them.

“Hey.” is too casual, but it’s still what comes out as I step inside. It blends right in with the awkwardness of everything.

It’s barren. Everything, her silence, the choking stench of cigarette smoke. Even her voice, when it’s allowed to me, carries little of its normal comforting qualities and I’m left to only wonder what has changed. She seemed so...accepted, where we left things off. This is choking, this is despondency.

She still drives the same, up to the lake, and stops before barreling us off into the depths, leaving us to sink slowly and with no comfort of the conversation we anticipate. Stops, leaves us in silence, each waiting...seeing who will open their mouth first. It’s me. Of course it has to be me.

“Are you--”

“Let me do this.” This. An event. Something that is pertinent to this meeting and is _happening_ no matter what I might say, and scares the hell out of me. Even as she breathes slowly, carelessly flicking the cigarette out the window.

Carelessness is just one of those noticeable little things that light up all around her in situations such as this, and I’ve noticed it more than ever in the past five minutes, in her posture, her voice, her hands. Oh, yes. It’s crystal clear that she doesn’t care. Is trying to seem like she doesn’t care, at the least.

“I don’t think we should do this anymore.”

“Do what?” The words that come spilling out don’t even feel genuine. They feel sour, deadpanning, awkward, and are received with a look filled with shallow guilt. That’s all. Nothing I can read into, nothing to reinterpret. I feel like I’ve hit a wall. “I don’t...do we have to?”

“Maybe. At least...not like we have been.”

“Why are you deciding this so suddenly?”

She sighs, and rolls down the window more, maybe to clear out some of the smoke that’s gathered, or just to have something for her fingers to do. 

“I was just...I don’t know, I talked to Baatar about it--”

“You told him?” Maybe I’m overreacting to this, but the initial feeling from the concept of her even...finding this to be something to just throw around...I feel like I, of anyone, should understand the value in opening up to people, but this? It doesn’t even phase her, who sits there, threading her fingers up in her necklace and staring ahead, face masklike, unblinking, only opening her mouth for a few words, tinged with annoyance.

“You can’t just expect me not to tell him things.”

“And he said?” Her mask dissolves as she shuts her eyes, breathing out slowly, five seconds. Her words come slower.

“He didn’t say anything. But talking about it helped me to face some crucial facts and that’s _why…”_

“Facts about what?” That entices one of her glares, but this one seems empty, more frustrated than normal. Perhaps in regards to the fact that I push to to actually have to admit to it out loud, what with the way she hisses it back, as if someone might hear.

“About _what we did.”_

“You make it sound like we, I don’t know, _murdered_ someone!”

I can tell, just tell that I’m working her farther up with every word, but like always, I can’t refrain. If I did, wouldn’t I just fall apart?

“You’re just a kid.” She holds it back. There isn’t a fight. “I don’t know if I’m ever going to forgive myself for what happened, but to...aid the process is all I want to know how to do.”

“And to aid the process means to…”

There isn’t an answer. Then, what feels like a year later, as I’m still trying to get the taste of all our words out of my mouth:

“Things got out of hand. I was naive to not have seen that so clearly.”

“And you’re just going to leave me, is that right? After everything?”

“I’m _not_ leaving you.” She snaps suddenly, with the papery _thwip_ of her pulling out a new cigarette, adding in before setting it between her lips, lower in volume. “I’m backing off.” 

“Can I still call you?”

I hold on to her sigh, the dismissive nod like it’s the breadcrumb trail back to a home I’ve long since gotten lost from.

I think I’m stunned.

I go to school, sometimes this part-time job I’ve picked up somewhere along the way. I go home. I do homework. But, naturally, it seems my thoughts can never travel from her. I wish she’d walk into the store, maybe for more cigarettes. She probably wouldn’t stoop as low as to even enter one of these run-down corner stores, and yet every time the little bell rings at the front, something inside me convulses. My notes turn into things I die to tell her, my diagrams, sketches. An ameteur profile, an expression, a feature. I stop doing my homework. 

I imagine her, fantasize her. I roll over in bed at night, the late-spring temperatures having me sticky and plastered against my sheets, and find her, replay in my head that night in the darkness like a broken record, with all our hands in those places they would never think to go normally, all the thoughtlessness, all the urgency. I tell her I can take the part she wants me to-- after everything, it is more in peace negotiation than honest choice. I see her more that way, talk more with her. A desperate grasp at normality.

She calls me into her office the day she tells everyone she’s choosing parts for the performance, and when I walk in, she’s pouring over her notes, drumming a pencil against the table so fast she drops it the second she looks up at me. Clears her throat, taps it accusingly at something she’s written.

“Well, you’re definitely cast for that main part. That much I have confirmed.”

“Okay.” I drag a chair around so that I can sit facing her, leaning over to better read her notes. “And with me?”

It’s someone I don’t know, that she’s decided on. Someone I haven’t been noticing in class, what with my unremitting stares for Su only, someone who will probably be awkward to perform alongside, for that reason.

“I asked her to come in too, so I could properly address the pair of you and get a schedule worked out for extra rehearsals, but she had to go take a test.” She doesn’t look up from the paper, eraser end of her pencil slipping into the familiar spot under her bottom lip. “Thought I’d might as well talk to you and have that much worked out.” Justifying the fact that she’s caused the two of us to be alone together. I know how she works.

“You know my schedule.” It’s a shallow amusement that comes of reminding her of that, watching her eyes snap up, processing, then returning to their focus without a word.

“Well, even so.” She straightens up, exhales, tucks a lock of hair back into place where it’s fallen as she’s leaned over. “I’ll get back to you on that, then.”

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

There isn’t anyone at the house when I get back from school, and I think that’s just fine. I still feel empty, sliding the key off of the doorframe, stepping inside and ignoring the hollow sound my shoes make against the floorboards. Instinct wants me to go straight for the phone.

I haven’t called her, even after so specifically asking if I could. I just haven’t been able to bring myself to.

The picture I caught her looking at all those nights ago stares from an otherwise empty wall, and right before I mount the steps to my room it catches me, and I have to return, if only to remind myself of its contents.

It’s funny. Even when my family wasn’t so much...like this, we never took pictures. Mom never had her makeup just right, or it was something like that, and the rest of us just didn’t care enough to really mind.

I can’t recall when this particular one was taken, but it doesn’t take much to realize it was forced out of us. A relative took it, or something. Framed it. Forced it upon us. Or Mom put it up, because she felt like it was obligatory to do so. Either way, the smiles are all too thin, arms too stiff around shoulders. I look happy. Ignorantly so, I’m probably five.

Everything is quiet now. I put on CD’s, the one that she gave me all those months ago. In Utero. I’d bought some more, picked them up here and there, but I only ever listen to the one, it seems. I should put out an effort to restock myself with all the music she would listen to, but I hardly remember any of the names. Just me, and Nirvana. For now, anything to take my mind off of that picture will do just fine.

Listening to her music makes me think of her, which shouldn’t be healthy, but still eases my heartache in the moment. Slams me back into shape, the rough guitar sound, the grittiness of the vocals. His voice makes me think of her, free-spirited, passionate, and I’m lost in it soon enough, thoughts rampant.

I always take myself back to that night. It’s inevitable to do so, when I have time alone and remain, for the most part, unanxious-- it’s just so easy to sink back into her touch, so easy to lose track of yourself in her kiss. Lose too much track, perhaps.

My fantasy is cut short, however, by the sudden slam of a door below me, and, before I think what I do, I’m already up off my bed. It’s not until I reach the bottom of the stairs that I begin to really wonder why I’ve come down in the first place.

I stop myself at the last step and hang there like it’s a diving board at the same time the bedroom door I can just glimpse down the hall swings back open.

Mom just freezes. Doesn’t brush me off, avoid my gaze like she’s done so many times in the past. She looks at me, straight in the eyes, arms motionless on the suitcase that dangles at her side. I wonder…

“What, did you forget about me?” I blurt out, and it’s the wrong thing to say, I know it is. I know it won’t do any good. She breathes, blinks back grey eyes my way, and keeps walking.

“You don’t even care, do you?” 

She keeps walking, all the way to the door, and I’m preparing myself to turn away when she stops, coughing a bit before calling out clearly.

“I’m figuring it out, okay?” 

And that’s it.

I stay there for a while, clutching the end of the rail like the breeze from the slammed door might just blow me off. I could go back upstairs, I guess. Maybe I should still try to catch her. Maybe instead…

“I need to talk to you.”

_“Kuvira”_

“Please. Just for a little while?” My finger goes purple inside the wrap of the telephone cord, and it takes me a few seconds to unwind it all before deciding to focus on the tingling in place of how her voice makes me want to melt.

_”I guess so.”_

“I love you.” Fuck. It just comes out, without even processing in my mind, it seems, and I start to consider just hanging up but I don’t.

_“Kuvira--”_

“I’m sorry. I--” And now it’s hard to talk. Fuck me. Fuck me. “I just saw my mom again and all she did was take more of her stuff and I just feel abandoned and helpless right now and I don’t know what to do okay?” I ramble all of this out so pathetically it makes me want to puke only remembering it a second later. I think I even begin to continue before her frequent interruptions reign me in.

_”Wait--hey--hey, baby just calm down, okay?”_

“Okay.” There’s a pause, the sound of something moving on her side.

 _”Would you feel better if I could…”_ Her breath rattles over the line, miles more controlled than my own, and I find myself trying to match it. _“I don’t know. Would you feel better if I saw you again, Maybe after school tomorrow?”_

“Yeah.”

_“Good. Okay. I actually still need to go out and figure out whatever the entire troupe is wearing for the performance. Twenty-seven of the same color shirt, you know. If you want...to...go with me maybe we can talk...or something like that.”_

Of course. Public places. Nowhere she could...lose it, I guess. And she’s right. We need a uniform.

 _“Can you do that?”_ I haven’t even realized I hadn’t responded.

“Yeah. Yeah I can.”

She won’t meet me up at the school, paranoid that someone will see and suspect something, so I walk home, tell him I’m studying with someone and find her at the corner, probably pretending not to feel the same little flip as I do when we finally meet eyes.

“We have to stop by my house first, okay?”

“Okay.” I wish I knew how iterate how I believe that she’s holding herself at a distance. I wish I could, and then for her to laugh, tell me I’m too observant. Always with my mind on something. But I can’t. I try, ask her how she is. She’s conflicted, stressed out, a mess. SImple as that.

“How come?” She caves in easily, smoothly, with one of those deep sighs.

“Preparations. Deadlines to meet. I almost dropkicked a fourteen-year-old yesterday.”

Those simple sentences change everything, shock us back into place in the moment it takes me to respond.

“Fourteen? Why?”

“Had his nose a little too high in the air.”

“What were you like when you were fourteen?” I fire back, and catch an elusive twitch of a smile before she returns to simple expressionlessness

“Oh, you know. Nose a little too high in the air.” She says, careless. Then adds, quieter, maybe not entirely for me to hear. “I still wasn’t phobic.”

I’ve never seen her house in daylight. Never even noticed the color. Green, in the kind of shade that should be offensive to the eyes but isn’t at all, the trees against it. The sunlight catching on all the windchimes hanging off the branches like refulgent silver fruits, the sentinel cat that sits perched on one of the rocks in the garden, it’s slender tail flapping over its paws, a ghost, jet black and staring directly at me. 

She pulls us into the driveway, kills the engine, but instead of pulling out the keys and opening the door, her hand drops and when I look at her she only stares forward, eyes wide  
and vacant. So I turn away, watch Shiva step down from her post, disappearing behind the side of the house.  
“Kuvira.”

I whip around, struck into silence as one one of my hands is lowered from my mouth, her other, not curled around my own, cupping my chin and holding it there.

For a fleeting second I wonder if I shouldn’t. If I should tell her it’s alright, that it’s only going to end up like last time. But now? Why would I?

Why wouldn’t I want her to do this again? Why would I decide it in my best interests to stop her, turning the other cheek to those glaring facts about our situation, about repercussions. Whatever this might be. 

“Please don’t look at me.”

“Mhmm.”

We pull back together, only enough for a quick breath before connecting once again, coming away slower this time, delayed enough for me to catch the glint of one of her eyes, the soft gasp for air that comes immediately after we break apart, and it only makes me ache more. Even though at this point I’ve looked at her, and I open my mouth to say something in reference to that but am cut off by her once again. Not in the same way, her thumb catching on the center of my lip.

“I’m sorry.” She holds be a hands length away, holds me-- and looks down through the small space between us as if she can’t even meet my eyes anymore. Her hands linger on my face for a few seconds, then drops away, and she sinks back into the seat.

“Don’t be.”

“I wanted to talk to you, that’s why I had decided to see you before you even called. I wanted to talk about this, face to face. No one’s home right now.” She nods towards the house.

This knowledge is comforting, yet a little unnerving. To know that she had thought all of this out without me. It’s all the more unsettling when my next question comes out unchecked.

“Do you love me?”

“Don’t ask me that. We can’t do this.”

I almost start to worry that things are heading the same direction as the last time we did this.

“I know.”

“I’ve made such a mess of everything. And maybe...with a little better timing…”

“I know.” She finally looks back, and keeps it. For a second there’s just undisturbed silence, and she smiles again, sadly, maybe a bit of fear mixed in, but still existent as I shift closer and her eyes move down.

There is a distinctive, egregiously apparent way for me to read her, one that I haven’t been able to use for long now, and one that I doubt i will get much chance to.

When she’s scared, she kisses you differently. When she’s self-aware, or thinking hard, it’s different. It’s different than when she lets go of all of these things, like that night in her office, like she just did. I notice this when she does it again, leaning down to meet me in the center. This quick motion, one hand riveting itself against the side of my face, dipping in and out, anxious, so unlike the last time. 

The last time: the same way someone might hurtle themself off a cliffside. A falling motion, but one that she seems to use her entire body to move into, charged with all the force she could possibly possess. But then she does it again.

It’s almost feral in the instinctive power that I feel surges between us, as we begin to slip even farther into the passenger seat, paying no attention to the fact of us being out in the open. It’s more _her_ than any other way she could do it, I think. More confident, more thoughtless, more passionate. More of everything she has in her that makes a mess out of me, and does in this moment. 

I allow my fingers to slip between the spaces of hers, focusing solely on how she looks back at me, never speaking, never moving from where we’ve stopped together. Doesn’t even let go of my face. And then, when she does speak, it seems all the more genuine.

“I’m through backing off.”

“Is that right?”

“Third time’s the charm, isn’t it?” She smiles. I think I do too. We’re still so close, then she pulls back slightly, brushes her hair back, straightens up. “We need to wait.”

“Wait.”

“We need to. We--maybe we could…” 

And she freezes, going glassy and motionless as a child caught with hand still in metaphorical cookie jar. Slides all the way back into her seat this time, raises her hand to her face and hits her forehead against the window as she looks back behind us.

A car pulls up at the side of the street, and I know precisely what that means. It doesn’t take her nearly silent whisper of _“you’re not supposed to be home”_ for me to figure it out, how she lets her head fall forward against the steering wheel.

“I can’t just leave.”

“Could we?”

“No!” Her eyes go blank again, focused at nothing, a slipcast formed from the evolution of everything in the past few minutes. “Shit. Shit, okay. This is happening.” She adds in, not fully in my direction, but out there, floating in the tight airspace of the car like smoke, stifling and encompassing. Turns the key again, and pulls us out, backing up alongside the slam of a car door that I only hear, refuse to make myself see, and leans out before I imagine she could convince herself not to.

I keep my head down, focused on the ground beneath my shoes, the scuff running across the toe of one. Or attempt to, when my mind is really racing with panic and anxiety and all sorts of things.

I’ve missed the words they exchange, fleeting and cheerful, so unlike the tones of the conversation we’ve been engaged in for the past few moments. For a second the magnitude of that hits me, and I begin to wonder if that might have anything to do with me. It hardly crosses my mind that it might be facade, an exaggeration, at least.

“..then I need to take Kuvira home, so I’ll...be back...and...yes.” I almost laugh outright at her, purely at how awkward she sounds, but hold it back long enough for my instincts to get the better of me and I glance over, meet his eyes through the windshield. Yes, we actually look at eachother, and I swear it is for an eternity. Not because it’s torture, but rather the lack thereof. I look up and we look straight at each other and I expect what I receive from it to be indignance or even hatred and it isn’t. It’s none of that. It makes me just a bit uncomfortable.

“I can walk.” It comes out too cheerful, disgusting and cliche, only made in an effort to seem like we haven’t reached the point where I take that stuff for granted. “If it happens to be out of your way, don’t even worry about it.”

She whips around at that, surprise evident, as if she’s forgotten I’m still here. Turns down my way and looks straight at me, eyes saying something I fail to understand quick enough.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

I shut up after that, and she goes back to her not-a-teenager who is also so fucking angelic he can’t even hold anything against me it seems, and I go back to pretending not to pay much attention to how they talk to one another or, above all, how she actually leans all the way out and kisses him before driving us away. I can’t say what kind.

“I’m sorry.”

Her hand still pulls at my wrist, the last shred of connection between us, a single tie. I pull my own away, and let it twist up in her fingers instead, squeezing hard.

“I can’t believe I fucked up so hard.” She laughs about it, but as I look back I really do notice that there’s no humor in her face.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“And then I...Oh god.”

“It’s fine.”

“Does that make you uncomfortable?”

“A bit...I mean I’ll get over it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

Our hands lift, still so tightly intertwined, and even though I still hesitate, press my mouth against her knuckles, watching how she visibly tenses under my grip.

“I love how you kiss me.”

I almost believe I have said it. Something that could so easily have slipped out in this exact moment, and yet--

I bring myself to look up, and the sheer melancholy in the expression I find across from my own face seems to physically pain me in some way, twisting in my gut slowly and forcefully, but somehow still...good. She stares ahead, doesn’t even spare me a glance. For once in the time that we've known each other, it's as if she is the one who is having trouble facing the other. Even after that night in her office, she stared straight into my eyes. This is just...it makes me feel low. but it also makes me think, because until now I never considered that the way I kissed her could be anything special. Desperate, nervous, but not that. How do I kiss her? How could I ever kiss her to make the way of it stand out so prominently in her mind that she feels she must say it aloud? I distinctly recall how I feel she does kiss me...but could she ever be the same way?

It starts as a whisper.

“I don’t know what to do.” I keep her hand, tuck it between mine, run my fingertips up hers, watch it unfurl in the sandwich of my own “It’s supposed to be on the surface, isn’t it? I mean I knew the second I realized that wasn’t the case--that it would be best for us to just avoid each other--” She stops, breathes in she’s been holding her breath for too long. “It’s not...as easy as I had anticipated.”

“I know.”

And just like that, we’re back. Maybe not just as we were when we left things off, but still transparent enough to each other that it’s easy to see that the same people exist. Everything is clear, glasslike. Crystalline, in a way, everything set into place where it needs to be. I feel normal again, and everything that had taken place between the night I kissed her in the dark and this moment was a hallucination.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> slipcast
> 
> n. the default expression that your face automatically reverts to when idle—amused, melancholic, pissed off—which occurs when a strong emotion gets buried and forgotten in the psychological laundry of everyday life, leaving you wearing an unintentional vibe of pink or blue or gray, or in rare cases, a tie-dye of sheer madness.
> 
>  
> 
> leave me alone my gf found this word and she wanted me to use it it's from the dictionary of obscure sorrows


	7. this isnt a chapter im sorry

hey all of you few readers ! if youre even reading this, i assumed it would be appropriate to let you all know like, i lost all of my digital "notes" for the rest of the story........like the....phone containing them on its notepad app.........fell 30 feet of a carnival ride....... lost  
and wow the best part is i had entire chapters in there and hey im sorry but   
so i have to flesh out the last four chapters, which had already been many hours in the making, entiiiiirely from scratch and the prospect of having to get down to doing that isn't the most...exciting of things for me at the moment ?  
my point is its going to take me a while  
so im doing a hiatus. for how long is indeterminate at the moment but its there and now you all know !

thank you all for reading, giving kudos, leaving your amazing comments, and subscribing ! i'm not giving up on this, and it would mean the world to me if you all stuck around to see the end. this is the first time i have ever committed myself to a work of this length, and to see you people enjoying it has really been the best experience and im trying not to sound sappy but gee i


	8. heart-shaped

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6P0SitRwy8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a big thank you to everyone who left me such nice words about losing all of my notes and i apologize again for this taking so long ! there's some recreational drug use around the end of this chapter if you need to avoid that, and also a bit about half way through that i want to warn you about but it's also an important point so please use your own discretion i hope everyone is having a nice day/night/whenever it is for you !
> 
> im the cashier by the way

There are places on earth where nothing is quite real. I mean to say, perhaps real, but not completely, or maybe completely, but not in quite the same way as with other places. I’ve discovered many of these, it’s like your bedroom before the sun has risen in the morning, or an empty convenience store with no one in the parking lot, or like rusted train cars off the highway, no traffic in the distance. It’s places that give you this feeling, or a lack of feeling, a distorted awareness of your surroundings that you can’t quite place. It’s this car. Little boxes that exist as holes in the dimension, little havens of weirdness that you can only feel.

When we stop at the corner, I hardly know what to say. In reference to us, or perhaps the twenty-seven of the same shirt we just cleared out a rack of. What a strange thing for the poor cashier to ring up, but then again they were blushing especially hard when Su handed over a credit card. Me too, buddy. Me too.

It doesn’t seem that there’s anything _to_ say at this point. She reaches over, turning towards me, and under the protection of darkness cups the side of my face, just looks back at me for a second before leaning forward and pressing her lips into my cheek.

I can feel her smiling, if only for a second, as I turn my head against hers and steal a kiss of my own against her jaw, a silent, desperate action, but don’t say anything about it - she’ll only tell me what I already know. It’s a perfect moment, unflawed by difficult realities, altered, a sacred space of unfeeling.

It’s this fucking car.  
......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

It should not surprise me that he’s drinking again when I get inside - not stumbling drunk by any means, but I do notice the bottle in the hand that’s not occupied with the idle turning of one of the knobs on the oven.

My mind just doesn’t seem to be here yet, I guess. It doesn’t even occur to me I’ve made it to the table, arms wrapped together on the polished surface, watching him, the crumpled box that sits to his side.

“I saw mom yesterday.” I blurt out as he pulls pizza out of the oven, grabs for a knife in the drawer beside him and starts cutting.

His acknowledgement takes place in the blink of an eye, the slight pause in how he cuts, then as he seems to return to it with more fervor, scraping the knife edge along the pan as it goes through.

“She...She didn’t talk to me.” I decide to clear up, though it hasn’t quite yet occurred to me why I’m even telling him this. Maybe some little part of me believes he’ll cut the drinking if he expects her to come back - that’s why she left, isn’t it?

“So she took more stuff, did she?”

“Yeah.” That uncomfortable feeling comes back, so when I move away from the table, I have to brave the route past him to the countertop, pulling out one of our last clean plates from the rack and sliding my claim of food onto the still-damp ceramic. I keep a wary eye to my right all the while, but there’s nothing to indicate he might come for me with any of this passive-aggression. He doesn’t say much of anything after that, just takes another drink.

“That woman wasn’t a good role model for you.” He grumbles bitterly, as I’m trying to move away. “It’s a good thing she didn’t stick around, turn you into the same thing she was.” 

_Hypocrite. As if you’re any better._

I’m left thinking about this as I go up to my room, lay my stolen plate at the end out of my desk and pull the rectangular case out of my pocket before taking my jacket off.

We had passed one of the stores where she would buy music, and without even questioning it, she was already pulling us up in front. I liked that, the spontaneity of that decision, like most others she makes.

It’s Led Zeppelin this time, she said I would like it, so it goes straight into my CD player, the case uniformly lined up beside the last one against the wall. She has a weird way of placing my music taste, not modeled so completely after her own. I notice the music she listens to is way softer than what I end up getting - which isn’t complaint, merely an observation. The dreamier the better, maybe. Perhaps that contributes to the ethereality of it all, sitting in that car all those nights. I like that she doesn’t buy me those things. It keeps it special.

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

It’s only right that Mom shows up again the next day, no doubt only to gather her mail, which I guess she forgot when I had confronted her two days before and she had to scurry away like some kind of cowardly little mouse.

I don’t like that I said that. It’s something he would say. _Fuck._

“You’re just going to leave again?” And now I’m following her, planting myself across from her at the table littered with unopened mail, where she sorts through and picks one out, slipping it into her purse with a colorless expression. “You’re going to leave _me_ again?”

At that she stops, right in front of the door, but only to unlock it. Perhaps that was too much, I start to wonder. My throat closes, pressure building up somewhere I can’t reach with my breath.

“Come with me, then.” She snaps, monotonously letting out that single, terrible sentence that doesn’t drip so much with honey as it does black, viscous tar. She turns back, eyes glaring and impatient.

I find myself wishing her back, all the overdone apologising, all the fake empathy - i’ve started realizing it was a hell of a lot better than this coldness. It occurs to me that something must have happened, between the last time she came to me and apologised for everything, and this. What it was doesn’t occur to me. Maybe that makes me ignorant, or maybe it’s not so apparent at this moment.

“Where?”

She sighs, leans back to smooth her hair down from where it’s come out in exactly zero places.

“Your grandparents place, for now. Until I find somewhere else.”

For a second, I think I’ll even do it. Not ask even one more question. Not even go back upstairs for anything, just nod and follow her out and go before having to spend another minute in this house. Maybe I’d bring my CD player, actually...

“Wait, that’s - that’s like, _hours_ away.”

“About an hour.” She shrugs, as if that makes all the difference.

“And what about school?”

“I’m sure the one over there will let you transfer, even so late.”

“That’s not just it, though,” I can tell she’s starting to get irritated with me, and ignore it decidedly. “I have performances, you know, for aerial and all that - I-I can’t just leave.”

“Then stay here.”

“No!”

“I don’t have time for this.” The door opens, letting in a sliver of blinding sunlight that hasn’t slipped through the heavy curtains. 

“Is that all I matter?” It feels like she might yell, as I’m still blinking away the light, but she doesn’t. There’s some fumbling as she reaches back into her purse, extracting a folded note, written across in her neat print. She steps forward and lets me take it, and that’s it. It doesn’t take any explanation. I know I can reach her at this phone number, and I know that means she hasn’t totally...abandoned me. So that’s okay. It’s something. It’s good.

I wish she would have left the door open.

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

The next day is the first of our serious rehearsals, and when I’m told to stay behind after everyone gets out, I’m hardly surprised. The other girl is friendly, seems set on becoming friends for the sole reason of it not being awkward, her and me and some fabric keeping us from plummeting to all kinds of bodily injury. I should probably make an effort to seem as enthused as her, which I do...perhaps not too successfully.

It’s a lot more talking than I anticipated, a lot of being led through the same moves I had practiced before. It’s alright I guess. We’re evenly matched in ways of skill level, and Su keeps saying we learn really fast, so I guess it’s safe to say that’s a good sign.

I’m _certain_ I focus on her too often. I’m certain as well that I only know this because I am equally aware of her focusing on me - _us._ Even though hers seem to be more of ghosts of stares, half-focused, mind thousands of miles away. She dismisses the both of us together, I wave back at the other girl, her name already fuzzy, and pretend to mess with the wrappings on my arms until the door closes behind her. Of course Su pressed me into wearing them. I was starting to get burns from the friction.

“What are you thinking about?” I call into the next room.

There’s a long stretch of silence, interrupted only by the sounds of her gathering things. The wrappings come off in a long, winding ribbon, sloughed off like I try the aftermath of our stifling, awkward conversation in the presence of others. Reluctant to let it go to waste, I fold it into my pocket for the next practice in lieu of throwing the thing away.

“Come on, what is it?

“Baby, you don’t want to know.”

“Tell me?”

“Just drop it.”

“Because we’re technically in public or because you just don’t want me to know?” I follow her back around the desk, waiting as she locks the door, turning out the lights as she laughs back, short and soft.

“Because I much prefer you staying in the dark as to what runs through my head on a daily basis.”

“Jesus.”

She elbows me away from her where I’ve come closer. I miraculously do it back. She pulls the door open and I step out after her into the pressing temperatures of coldfront, shrinking down inside my jacket as best as I can under the sudden rush of wind.She locks the door just as I stop my shivering enough to turn around, and everything is shadowed but one of the lights on the side of the building casts a lighter sheen across her face when her head angles a certain way.

“If you’re so anxious to know, why don’t you tell me just what exactly _you’re_ thinking about?”

I shrug, get back a look of disbelief. So it comes on in my mind what an amazing thing I could do to combat this.

“...Thinking about...I don’t know…” Her arms fold, looking up at me in presumptuous conquest. “What would happen if I were to just kiss you instead of answering this question.”

Her eyebrows shoot up, head turning a centimeter to the side in surprise. _That’s it, that’s the angle._. I almost backtrack, almost. But I stand my ground, accept the silent challenge. Then the fingers that move under my jacket, hook around the strap of my shirt, leading me around the other side of the door, the shadowed part of the wall where the light doesn’t quite reach, where the door comes out a few feet from the rest of the building. She glances around quickly. I watch. There’s a moment that I’m caught off guard, and then tugged forward by the same fingers, pulled into the wall. A hand burrowing in my hair, there’s a laugh filling my mouth, I can’t keep silent just all the way because there is too much happening inside.

The process of coming down is still happening as I open my eyes and drink up even more in those directly across from me, still smiling, still close. We move away as if every word has been dragged out of our lungs, lost between tongues and the puffs of steam rising between us.

I can feel it, the unwarranted smile that clings on, and for a second I find it mirrored in front of me, and I can just feel myself sinking in, getting too comfortable. So much so that when seconds pass and her eyes open and she turns away - I drain free, and instead of comfortably sinking, I feel stuck instead in quicksand and have to step away to allow her out from between me and the wall.

There’s a moment I can’t help but wonder. What it might be like. But I never dwell on it, I never do. I have my own process of pushing those things away, filtering my daydreams out like language, the good, the vulgar, what can enter my head, what needs to be blacklisted. Imagining us, forever, is just another one for the blacklist.

I think now, long after this story has ended, and knee-deep in a future where all of this is merely a retelling, I know why. Why all of my frequent thoughts of the future, things that might happen to it were all pushed far away. Why I couldn’t spare them a glace any more than the shadow of a cloud over the sun, hardly altering reality before whisping away onto a different place, out of my mind.

It’s a simultaneous thing, that starts to happen at this time. Something I start to feel deep down, underneath all the layers of home drama, school, anxiety for our performance at the end of the year. Kind of what I think about when I lay in bed at night. What had been centered at the very pit of my being, what had been pulling at the strings of my reality for months without my acknowledgement. Eating away like a termite when all the while I swore I was made of stone.

It’s the truth about...this, I guess. It’s the little bundle of only the hardest truths that ferments at the very bottom of my chest, where i’ve shoved it to make way for all those feelings that make someone feel so much better when they’re held up to the heart instead.I know that it exists, oddly enough, but like any spider that that swings itself across your ceiling, i’d rather not make myself touch it.

It’s that I know what will happen. I know, I’ve always known, where I will end up, following my mom. Our encounter the night before had only reminded me even further of that. And us? Su? We won’t last. I’ll never get to experience this the way I want. That all of this...it’ll just end up as some distant memory, something that I’ll look back upon as the follies of my younger self, my mistakes, a teenage dream. But that’s not right at all. I can’t regret her, I know that. Even if I leave somewhere after graduation and we don’t see eachother anymore. It’ll be...alright. Even if the both of us go on with our lives and gradually fade out of everyday memory, It’ll be alright. Isn’t it always?

I continue to distract myself with thoughts of her, continue to respond to her frequent complaints of “we need to stop doing this” with “once you quit smoking”. 

And we continue to stew in our own guilt like this for weeks. It just drags on, endless, and like only a few seconds at the same time. There are moments...where it’s better, in between all the depressing ones. Long talks about the most pointless of things, and then things at the house, things I’ve heard him say, things I’ve noticed, things I’m afraid of, that I have trouble bottling up - and she does such a flawless job of helping those things out of me. Everything is like it was before...and yet so much different.

Most of the time all we do is drive out to the lake, where we can listen to music and just sit there and talk about anything. I tell her about my doubts in regards to where I’ll go after I graduate. I know I don’t want to stay at the house. She listens, then tells me if I can’t, or simply don’t want to work up the money for college dorms or whatever, I can stay with her. The concept is not unlike a non-existent, get-into-heaven-free card.

“I need a cigarette.”

“You already had one.” I still watch as she takes out the little silver lighter she always uses, leaving it on the console as she goes to fish around for the pack I know she keeps under the seat, not even attempting to justify herself. I don’t say anything else, but I do stare long and hard at the lighter as she curses over her pack, which has slid too far under the seat.

It’s not until she emerges, tucking her hair back out of her face and cigarette in mouth, that she reaches for the console unawares, and then fixes on me an accusatory look.

“Really?”

“You already had one.” I repeat, shrug, hope she won’t blow up on me - even though I know she wouldn’t. She looks at me, horrified, like I’ve stabbed her in the back, and I wrap my fist tighter around the little rectangle in my pocket.

“That’s no excuse to _steal_ from me.” 

“It’s plenty of an excuse.”

“Give it back.”

I shake my head.

“I’m not joking.”

“Neither am I.”

Her arm has me in a death grip in a matter of seconds, pulling my hand out, still clamped shut around her lighter. I don’t even attempt to combat her strength, but quickly switch it between my hands as she fights me all the way over the seat. It’s not until she gets both my wrists pinned that I develop my next move, and before she can open my hand I move my entire body up and slip it the only place I’m certain she wouldn’t go.

I drop her lighter down my shirt, falling back down against the seat as her grip slackens and hold back a smile as she gapes at me, at least as much as she can with a cigarette still in her mouth. It’s a bit sadistic of me then, to start laughing, but I know she would be too, if only for the way we’ve lunged into the passenger seat, her hands still on mine, like kids I guess, fighting over a toy. It’s kind of ridiculously cliche, how we sit in silence, frozen, then erupting into laughter all at once.

One of my hands is freed as I twist it under hers, and in a second of searching I have it back out again, flicking open the cap. It takes more than one try to strike it, but it ignites eventually and I raise it back to the end of her cigarette in peace offering.

I let her eyes go to mine, let them go through as I tuck the lighter back into place and watch her calm visibly. She cups a hand in front of her mouth when she removes it, so the smoke blows behind her, watching me all the while with the firey glow of annoyance still in her eyes.

“I love you.”

You’d think I had told her I had contracted some horrible, contagious disease. 

She pulls herself away, and leaves me suddenly feeling as if I have swallowed something too large for my throat, a weird lump that never goes down as often as you swallow.

“Why do you always distance yourself from me when I say that?” The hand not filled with cigarette pushes back another misplaced lock of hair, then moves to put the car back into gear, fingers wrapping tight around the joystick, but unmoving.

“As cliche as it sounds, I’m trying not to...hurt you.”

“This hurts more. Constantly being reminded that you don’t love me.” I catch how she stiffens up out of the corner of my eye, fingers still firm on the joystick, almost driving us away but not reaching that consensus with herself. She raises the cigarette.

“Everyone says “I love you”, Kuvira.”

The CD ends, which is too un-ironic, but gives me an excuse to open the glovebox in search of a new one. I’m formulating my answer as I sift around, knowing she watches me all the while.

“I don’t.” I settle upon. “I hadn’t, before I met you. Don’t you think that should amount to something?” I pick out one of the CDs by a finger, spin it around, an unnamed, refulgent silver skin with the smudge of something written in marker, then wiped away. “What’s on this one?”

She gives in, remarkably quickly, reaches over and takes it from my hands, turns it over, blinking, then hands it back.

“I don’t remember. Just put it in." There’s a pause, in which I go about doing so, finding the discarded sleeve of our last, before she speaks again. "You wouldn't let me have another cigarette, would you?"

“No.”

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

Mom promises me things to make up for her absence. Community college, a place to stay within commuting distance. The shreds of my family, stitched together again. And before I know it, I’m nodding along, filling out an application on the chrome tabletop of some crummy restaurant I’ve agreed to meet her at.

I think about Su every minute I spend with her, and I hope that part is understood. I haven’t simply forgotten about her - in actuality, I may be thinking about her even more. I think about everything a bit more, talk about everything a bit less, consequently.

I do tell her, as soon as it seems right to, how I plan to leave. There isn’t much doubt in my mind that it won’t be difficult, and it isn’t, not at first.

We sit, wordless, unmoving, the doors swung open on both sides, the only indication that this isn’t a still from a movie the low sounds of the radio and the smoke that trails out of her doorway.

“Are you sure about this?” The spell breaks so suddenly I take a moment to process her words, how they come out, so meditated, so sure in their doubt of my decisions.

“As sure as I really could be.”

I watch her wasted cigarette get smothered in the ashtray between us, studying how she turns it against the glass surface, the bright orange now down to ash in less than a second, and after that for a few seconds before taking her hand back.

“This is...the same woman who…” Pause. “Abandoned you without a word, and that was only last month. I don’t know how I feel about that. Her traipsing back after weeks without explanation to take you along, because now it’s convenient.”

“When you put it like that.”

“I’m not trying to deter you from doing what you feel is right -”

“I know.”

“I just wanted you to have another opinion.”

“I know.”

There, easy. At least, as far as I can see. Easy.

“She’s the last bit of family I have, I mean. She’s been an asshole but I’m willing to overlook that, you know?”

“You don’t need to explain yourself.” It’s so silent of a reminder, I feel that it comes from my own mind, but when I look back she’s adopted the kid of expression that gives her away instantly.

“Yeah.”

It’s strange. I feel like we’re slipping away - like _I’m_ slipping away, it’s harder to open up to her like I used to. It could be stress or something, I don’t know. I know that it’s unconscious, because I can still say with all my being that I long to be near her, crave it, anticipate it. But then night comes around and it’s just…A big mess of guilt, everything that is wrong with us balled up in my throat.

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

One of the most strange and surprisingly difficult things there is for me to face at this time is how to see someone and pretend they haven’t reason to punch you in the face if they knew. Even worse is when you feel so transparent about it. A big sticker on your forehead proudly reading, hey I’ve made out with your mom. Something like that. I still have the guy in homeroom, I still know he’s some kind of genius....and I still know I’m on the fringe of passing calculus.

In some kind of feat of bravery, I’m leaned over the metal rod of my desk and with very little ceremony, his same strikingly green eyes are on me, and it’s all spotlight. I get something out surprisingly smoothly, quite possibly the smoothest ever in my life, and he’s explaining things back to and oh _god_ the only thing I’m gleaning from any of this is how he kinda tucks his hair back like she does - I start to wonder if I could have trained myself to fall in love with him instead- but I don’t think you fall in love with a mannerism.

There’s a few seconds we’re silent and I start to sink back into my own thoughts, returning the pencil to the page without writing a word, only at the ready for when it does come to me.

“Thanks.” I say too loudly as we go back to our own affairs and I’ve already begun to deconstruct everything to find what I’ve done wrong or said wrong to this guy and what should be keeping me up for the next few nights.

“It’s no problem.”

Everything goes well the next few days. Lots of practice, that starts getting less awkwards as we go on and more like a game of pretend-to-not-stare and pretend-to-not-think-about-kissing. There isn’t drinking anymore with him, I start to have hope again. That things are almost done.

But things are seldom ever really done.

It comes like a knife to the gut, how I sit in class one day and remember something all at once. Something terrible. Something certainly small and easy to overlook, but otherwise very significant. 

I decided to call mom the night before, wondering if she might take over a few boxes I had packed and wouldn’t need around. Nothing big, just a few minutes of useless and hushed conversation, and then back up to my room to drown myself in a small collection of C.D’s i’ve been building. No thought to the fact that I left her number by the phone, just the little slip of paper with a few numbers. Just a paper. 

Could I be so thoughtless?

It consumes me, it eats me out from the inside, it beats me up into little bits for the rest of the day until I’m walking home and stop and realize, if he did see it and was intuitive enough to come to the conclusion it was mom, what am I doing walking into that rage?

But it’s too late to do anything else.

So I dare to step inside, closing the door softly as if it makes all the difference. Is it there?

It isn’t. Oh god it isn’t. I must have imagined the whole thing, I guess. I must have taken it back up with me after I had called. It seems just about right.

A few more steps, as cautious as in a horror movie. What’s that shadow around the corner?

“Whose number is this?” My skin separates itself from my body, and I stumble as I turn, catching the end of the banister as I face him at the other side of the room, arms folded against the tabletop, nestling a bottle in between.

“It’s that bastard boyfriend of yours again, isn’t it. You’ve been calling him up, haven’t you?”

I feel like things would turn out better if I were to simply accept this accusation. But there is also a certain level of self-respect that I can’t dip below, and eventually, that wins out.

“No.”

“Of course.”

“There is _no_ ‘boyfriend’.” 

One hand pushes the paper across the table, then retreats, calmly lifting the bottle out by the neck.

“Call it.” I come forward quickly, sliding it the rest of the way until it slips off the table edge and into my hand.

“It’s not him.”

“You call it.”

Oh, but what would happen if I did? Talk your way out of it.

The paper crunches inside my fist, and I crush it together again and again until it forms a little ball.

“Okay, it’s mom.”

“That’s a _lie!”_ He snaps, and I take a step back. What would you be calling that bitch for?”

“So I can get of this shitty house.” Another step, then two.

“Don’t talk to me like that!” Something has gone wrong, and I can feel it, I can hear it long before he stands, bringing his bottle down against the polished wood hard enough I fear it shattering.

“You can’t blame me!”

All of my lessons shorthand the second he approaches me, my limbs turning brittle and shaking.

“I’m tired of way you’re _talking_ to me.” 

Please get a hold of yourself. 

“And how you keep going behind my back. How _dare_ you talk to her, after she left me to take care of you on my own.” Hand. Shirt. “She doesn’t give a shit about either of us, and you’re the same backstabbing little whore.”

There’s a degree to which you can take something like that. And I fill myself up, accept all those words he says like medicine, but then without any sickness to be cured. It’s pointless talk and pointless stress on my shoulders, and it begins to trigger some gag reflex concealed underneath the hard surface. I know I can’t take much more the second we touch, and the line stretches even tighter as our voices rise.

But I keep it together.

His knuckles connect agaisnt my eye, and I hit the hand away, and go, knowing he’ll stop to realize what he did, and I have time to get up the stairs. But I keep it together.

I keep it together. I’m full of rage, urges to lash out. Urges to punch something until burn myself out, which is easily solved with a pillow, but doesn’t do the trick like I thought. I begin to wonder what it looks like. There isn’t any mirror in my room.

It hurts when I lift my fingers up to it. So I wait, listen outside the door, then move swiftly to the bathroom, which I close and lock before feeling for a light switch. 

I wish she would have left some of her plethora of makeup products here when she left. Just something that could help cover up this shiny streak under my eye, now deepened to a color more resembling wine stains than a misplaced blush. It’s just so there’s no hope of concealing it with my hair, too. I could ask...but then again I’m not in the mood to see Mel or her inquiring, pushy mouth. The conclusions she’d jump to. The tales she’d spread. At the end of it all, I might even be better off simply turning away from people for the next few days. Inventing a story. I could do it. I will do it. 

The hardest part is aerial, really, walking into that room that smells of resin and things that I now associate with a certain someone that I can’t be thinking about right now, because if I think of her, she’ll come, and if she comes, she’ll see and my little game will have been lost. It suddenly seems very juvenile. Why would I keep this from her?

 

I still keep my distance, moving towards the back of the room, where the singular ring dangles unused like some kind of great art piece without an admirer. I grab it. It’s awkward, very solid under my hand, when i’m so used to clinging to fabric, but one way or another I hoist myself up into the curve of it, hands tight on the sides of me in fear of losing grip.

I make sure I’m secure over the edge before letting go, dropping backwards into the waiting abyss -

\- And come face-to-face with Su.

I keep a firm hold on the ring, about to open my mouth and ask why she’s looking at me like she is, when I remember. The others are all occupied, but I still try to shake my head in silence, hoping to God she won’t say a thing out loud when her eyes flick straight to the side of my face. 

She bends down, bringing her face close to mine, and reaches out, thumb tracing the socket of my eye. The pad of her finger hovers over the darkest spot as I remember it, close against the bridge of my nose.

“I -”

She knows what happened. I didn’t have to call for her to know, by now. I still find myself searching in her expression, no longer unsurpassable, solid rock. She hasn’t moved, but seems frozen almost in a limbo; suspended between melancholy and infuriation, stunned. Like she’s either about to slap me or burst out crying.

I actually almost begin to talk right there, tell her this isn’t new, it’s fine, i’m dealing with it, but cut myself off when I realize how counter-productive that would be. She’s already tired of this, without the extra blow of hearing that this has happened multiple times. And I am too, but not quite like she is. Sometimes I feel like she takes the hits -not intentionally literal - for me, because as I feel it hurting less and less, it almost seems as if it rises higher and higher in her reactions to things like this.

“Are you getting into fights, or what?”

“Of course not.”

“Good.” I flash a desperate smirk, and in front of the crushing sadness in her eyes she smiles, hand falling away and cocking a single eyebrow before adding: “You know something like that on your record is a one-way ticket to getting kicked out of the troupe.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

She turns and leaves me, and I pull up onto the ring, raising a hand to the top for balance. 

I don’t wait to see if she wants to drop me off after rehearsal that night, and it barely registers in my mind why. I’m scared, truthfully, of what she might say. The look on her face.

I want to ignore all of this, and she makes that impossible. Of course, I barely make it a block before the Jag sneaks up beside me. A glance reveals all I need to know.

She’s already lighting a cigarette.

I slip inside quietly, crushed with tension the second the door closes, and wrap my arms under the straps of my bag like a security pillow.

Everything is silent, and I realise, as smoke fills the cab, where this is going. And after a long exhale that must drag every bit of nicotine-defiled oxygen from her lungs, she finally breaks the silence.

“Would you like to explain why this is still happening?”

“It’s not - he just - he was just really drunk, is all, it’s been -”

“And that’s an _excuse?”_

I feel like I know that it’s serious, know better than many things I have known in my life that it is no longer concern, or worry, driving this conversation forward. Full, generously bridled rage is coming my way, and I am aware of it. There’s been time, for her to mull this over, to decide a course of action. This is it.

“So he punched you, in the _fucking_ face and you were just going to keep it _quiet?_ What the fuck happened to standing up for yourself? Your training?”

“The only reason I didn’t think to say anything was because I didn’t know _what_ to say!” Didn’t know how to make her worry. Didn’t know how to face that.

“Kids like you are taken out of their homes for the kind of shit that man does daily!”

“So what?”

“So you don’t see the point in letting at least _me_ know about it?”

“I wouldn’t let this on to anyone.”

“Not even me?”

“You think you’re just so fucking entitled!”

And it stops. TIme, it just...stops. I don’t know whether it’s by realization that she’s revealed much of the purpose of this sudden outburst, or otherwise… Okay, I shouldn’t have said that. I _really_ shouldn’t have said that. In fact, I can’t think of a single thing I could have just said that would have been worse than that.

Expecting her to look like she’s just been slapped, or at least a little stunned, I look beside me, bracing for an intense return, but there’s nothing.

“I just wish you cared.” She sighs, flicks the cigarette between her fingers and spills ash into the floorboard. “ As much as I do.”

“Don’t say that.”

She’s stopped the car a long time ago, where she would usually let me off. 

“I’ll come back later.” It’s all I can do to nod, staring forward so resolutely I only catch a glimpse of her in my peripheral, trying to catch my attention by leaning forward, head turned. “Do you know you can get away? Eleven, maybe?”

“Yeah.”

 

Everything feels so much the same as I climb in a few hours later, it occurs to me that we could have just continued on without the detour, but I assume she benefitted from time to collect thoughts. That, and it looks like she was busy by the jar she drops into my hands the second I get inside.

“You can put that on a cotton ball or something and dab it around your eye. Leave it on for around five minutes, do that three times a day.” 

“What is it?” I turn over the suspicious liquid, watching it swirl around the bottom of the jar. It’s not that I’m suspicious. She seems to think so, anyway.

“Witch hazel...other things. It’ll help...with that.” I nod in confirmation. “Tell me what happened?”

“I’d rather not.”

“You might have to.”

“I don’t want to, okay?” This ends it, end the expectancy I’ve been faced with and now her words are calm, les forceful, punctuated with silences and sighs.

“Promise me that you’ll call the cops next time he tries something like this. If not that, just go with your mom. Get it over with.”

It’s the requirement. It’s this, or the high road. And I come so close. I know if I agree, everything will be back to normal, and isn’t that just what I’m wanting? I nod slowly, it seems reasonable, it seems appropriate. But it hits me, and I don’t know what held me back until now, but suddenly I hit the bars and realize, and my response comes out in a blunt, unashamed:

“I can’t.”

Her face falls, even more than it had already. It flashes through my mind that I could find some way to regroup, but it won’t happen.

“Why?”

“I don’t want...I don’t want to lose you. Not now, not...yet. ”

And I feel terrible for it, I leave out, and I feel terrible for saying it anyways, and the expression on her only reinforces how much of a fucking mistake that was. Hard, wiped clean, and impossible to gauge even the smallest ounce of emotion from until she breathes out and the structure falls in at the seams.

“Kuvira, I love you, but if I’m at all standing in the way of you getting what you need -”

“You’re not standing in my way!”

“You’re obviously placing value on my presence in your life over things that you actually need in order to not turn out… _I don’t know.”_

And this is how we stop. On the curb, still a few blocks away from the house, and it goes without saying that I’m meant to get out, no matter how hard I try to hold on. I don’t know...I don’t know if I can. Without the kicking and screaming.

But then there’s that. That thing that makes me feel sucked dry, and piled up inside with bricks at the same time. That leaves me feel like I’m pooling out in the passenger seat, a little puddle of depression in the floorboard with the rain that clung to my shoes as I came inside.

“You love me.” I think she expected to get away with that, the way she closes her eyes and breathes, doesn’t even answer at first, and I start to believe she doesn’t plan to.

“I didn’t mean to say that.”

“Like hell you didn’t.”

“It just came out -”

“You’re a fucking hypocrite, you know?” I understand this is all in an effort to work her up, because I wish she would fight me, wish she would try to defend herself, give me some reasoning behind my own blows, something to hit as opposed to holding me at a distance as I swing at the air. 

She won’t answer me, and against my best judgement, I find myself turning away from the window to watch her, face drawn, unremitting. Then as she nods, slowly, without a word, humming her agreement and taking a short drag of her cigarette before directing the smoke out of the cracked window. Away from me, I realize with a sudden rush of feeling not unlike a punch to the gut.

“One thing about being a hopeless romantic, Vira, is you don’t always end up getting exactly what you’d like to.”

“Are you going to leave me?”

“I’m going to do what’s best.”

That’s it. It’s so harsh, no sugarcoating, no “maybe that would be best or “do you think it would help?” It’s just a maybe, a maybe that means yes, that means she’s done. This is real, her being done, she’s leaving me over this. Over _this._ It infuriates me, but hurts even harder than simple anger. Because I know I shouldn’t, I know it’s been a luxury I have no place in crying over the loss of, but at the same time I need to - it’s like the urgent need to puke your guts up, because you know you will feel better afterwards, but being unable to. Because it hurts. It hurts to break down, it hurts so terribly it’s almost unbearable when you’re trying to do it.

I don’t want it. I just want this back, I want her, her repeating things she said back there, but not when on the verge of snapping, things about love and requirement, and things so gut-wrenchingly sappy they make me hurt. I need her back already, feel like I’m suffocating. But that’s selfish, and not what she wants, and I can’t help that.

“You’re all I have.” I say quite dejectedly, met with nothing but a shake of her head, words careless and rushed.

“Not all that you could have. Kuvira, it’s not worth it when he's -" There's a pause that seems so much for the dramatic affect, her hands tightening around the wheel until her knuckles go light. "Jesus, he's abusing you. You realize this, don't you?"

"I don't know."

“Know.”

“I can’t just _know.”_

“If you would stop being in denial about it - Just go, okay? Call her and make arrangements to get out of there, something.” She looks back expectantly, although I don’t feel like I have anything to offer, breaks out once again. “I can’t keep watching this.”

I don’t even really think about it when I find the door handle, try to go blindly out onto the sidewalk, slamming the door shut with unestimated force. It’s only a few miles, I guess. I can’t even stand to sit in there with her. Some kind of overwhelming urge to...I don’t know. Something I don’t want.

“Kuvira.” The second slam escaped me, and her hand almost does get close enough before I’ve jerked back. 

Who knows what makes me let go at this moment, completely break in two elastic strips that latch onto her arm wrapped around my wrist and turn who knows why it was never him all those times that I needed to escape, the one who deserves it, and instead, of all people, her.

She looks at me, hands raised, like she just tried to kill someone.

“This is your excuse! This is your way out!”

“What - what do you mean?”

“You don’t have the willpower to stay away from me, so you’re _pushing_ me out of your life! That’s what’s going on here!”

“Stop.”

“I can’t believe you -”

“Kuvira.” I don’t want to do anything else. I keep walking after that, and for a second I hear her following close behind before dropping off into nothingness. A few miles, right? 

_And you tell me you love me!_

“Vira please just get in the car.”

I do. It’s a timeless drive, nothing occurring except in one moment her hand comes down against mine, slumped against my side and uncurls, pressing something between my fingers with a slow firmness that should speak thousands of words but I’m too tired to listen.

Or to really pay attention when, down the sidewalk, my hand loosens around the shape and it disappears against my fingertips.

….. . . ….. … .. . .

It seems that it’ll all just fall back into place, doesn’t it? I know it will, but then we don’t talk the next day, or the day after that, and when one night, when my bruises are faded far out of sight and i’m using the empty jar to hold pencils, I dare a call that goes unanswered. Of course, she might be out. She wouldn’t ignore my calls. She’s just busy, caught up in something or other. She’ll call back. No leason to lose my cool over it.

Something shiny catches my eye as I descend the stairs down to the sidewalk the morning after that, something down in the grass that urges me not to come to it but I do anyway, crouching on the concrete and picking it out, the smooth metal box that still goes in my pocket no matter how I discarded and forgot it nights ago.

You know, sacrificing your feelings in the best interest of someone else, it’s bullshit. Feeling bad so someone can feel good - I realize that when I see her, after class one random day. She’s talking with someone, just talking, and I don’t know why, but she just...she seems happy, when unoccupied with me. Happier than she’s been around me in a while, that’s for sure. It’s weird, and couldn’t actually mean that much for sure, but I remember looking at her, and the moment she notices and looks back, and that happiness, that light just _drains._ It’s a stab to my entire being, and destroys me.

I don’t call again. I don’t look at her again. Everything is better. That’s just how it happens.

There has been no sacrifice with us losing each other. Not anymore. I only ever feel my worst when I’m around her, in fact. And I can tell I’m not the only one. I can’t pretend I don’t catch the look in her eyes, like I’m something she regrets. So as much as I hate not having her, the freedom is...it’s good. It’s no longer guilt as Mom leaves me cardboard boxes and I start shoving shit into them, taking time to stack all of my clothes into neat piles, trying not to think too hard about what I should be feeling.

It makes me feel weird. Larger than life, than I know I am, because in these first few weeks that I spend from her, I feel as if I have her in my hands. How she got there is beyond me, since I never quite recall holding out my hands and watching someone slap a human heart into them, telling me to do with it what I will. We can’t even have a conversation without me feeling like I’ve kicked a puppy, just with the way she’s always looking at me. I only speak to her when we’re all in rehearsal, and I say little, trying to stick to Mel in the hope that her flirtatious manners might overshadow my awkwardness in some way. That part actually seems to work out surprisingly well. 

We meet against walls and in corners, she’s a snappy, sarcastic tent for me to hide inside, to walk home with like we used to, to get my mind off of things. In rehearsals I find her, stand with her, know that I cannot be approached like this. Is that using her? She wouldn’t mind. She doesn’t even know.

“So you’re coming to my birthday party, aren’t you?” Her elbow hits me in the ribs, we watch a demonstration with her eyes wide and mine trying not to look as much as I know I need to in order to copy it. I look at Mel instead, focus myself on the loose strand of hair that whisps out of her unclean ponytail, how her lips part as she watches.

“Depends what you’ll be talking about.” 

Mel doesn’t respond right away, which on it’s own is something slightly out of the ordinary, she’s always there, snapping at you like swift elastic, but it takes a whole few seconds for her to tear away.

“Huh?” A few more seconds bring her back, rolling her eyes with a wide “Oh my god, I’m over that.”

“Are you sure?”

“Come on, you’re not still mad about it, are you?” She reaches around under us for her bag. We’ve been dismissed, except for me and the other one. _Seriously, what is her name again?_ “We got even, remember? You gave me a bloody nose? I got over it?”

“Whatever you say.”

“You coming or not?”

“Yeah.”

When Mel is gone, I have nothing. It’s only me, her, Kenzie(that’s the name), and a whole lot of unnecessary tension. We’re almost halfway there, she tells us, playing with her necklace as I wrap my ankles tight in both ends of the silk and turn myself upside down, nodding in response as I wait for a tiny hand to dig into my wrist with 125 pounds of 16-year-old.

It doesn’t feel as dangerous as it should, I guess. It just hurts. The whole idea of a routine is to make it look easy, when, in reality you shake and your heart races and you forget there is any floor below you.

But then you’re down, and breathing deeply in relief. A few words are exchanged then, lots of motivation and sweet talk, and it’s the two of us.

“Let me give you a ride, okay?” I’ve opened my mouth to be the bigger person or whatever, and she’s already shut me down, finger ready on some button I forgot she even knew about. “It’s not a choice.”

“But what about -”

_“- No.”_

I’m reluctant to fall right back into the pit of longing and nostalgia that is her passenger seat, is all. The drive feels like it’s taking forever. So much so that it becomes stifling, remaining in perfect silence. Such an ethereal experience to be warped into the claustrophobic, tightening sensation of being locked into a tight little box.

“So, what made you…” I tap my own hair in indication of hers, which i’ve been thinking about for days. Cut is an understatement. I wonder if it was some kind of subconscious cleansing, I mean some metaphor for changing ways. I doubt she could change her ways, but maybe I could be wrong. I just remember how I used to wrap my hands up in all off it, and wonder if she does too.

“Whim.”

“Pure whim?”

“Well, I...a little bit of that, and knowing it would be easier to deal with.”

“I hate to be the one to say this, but -” And there it goes, everything tumbling down, and it’s the same once again, small relief. “It makes you look really gay.”

“You’re bold.”

“I’m honest.” I am honest. I am a fucking idiot with no self control. Perhaps I should tell her that.

“And I’m not gay. Not in the slightest.”

The laugh that comes out escapes without any warning, more a desperate release of an escalating tightness in my lungs than anything with a semblance of genuinity. But it does something, when she smiles back and things start to flake away, the box expanding enough for a little breathing room,until everything is back again.

It’s started to rain by the time we’re back, and I almost have reason to decide to stay in until it lets up, but it doesn’t look like it will. She tells me to hurry. Good thing she gave me a ride, I think, forgetting about our conversation as I pull up my hood as a cup for the sideways rain.

I get in just as it begins to pour, peeling off my jacket just to leave it unceremoniously on the banister before making the steps upstairs. No one home. Empty. Ad the next morning too. 

There’s a storm that comes in that night, waking me up to crashes outside my window, eerie light turning things yellowish and unfamiliar. A clock reads 9:45. Someone’s blinds ripple at a gush of wind coming from under a crack in the window. I walk over to close it, and bones crack as I pull upright. There isn’t any car in the driveway, which probably means wherever he ended up last night, he didn’t want to endure the storm, or maybe there was some flooding on the streets. I wonder if he tried, but didn’t make it.

I can go downstairs now that he’s not home, and I do. Walk around barefoot in the kitchen, making cereal, then open all the curtains and blinds and sit on the table for no particular reason, watching it rain and wondering if I could find it within myself to pick up the phone. I end up not doing anything of the sort, but when the rain lets up I do call Mel, ask her to get me a ride to her party later, and close the windows, leaving a note full of lies on the table before pulling on my jacket and stepping out into the wet, wet aftermath.

She’s already stoned as she fumbles to open the door, falling all over me in the gelatinous way that implies something else is being thrown into the mix. I silently thank her brother for urging me into this situation as I’m led down the stairs and engulfed with the smoke, the taste of weed in every inhalation. Looking back, I should have demanded hourly pay. And some kind of explanation as to how they plan to clear out the smell before their parents are due back home. Whenever that is.

I’m practically jerked down beside her on the couch and she snuggles in real close and gets right back to rolling her papers, already lit up and ready before looking at me again for a pathetic, “so how was your day?”

“Fine.” So it’s a little funny, I guess. I assume that’s insensitive, that I should be reprimanding her for getting all tied up in illegal drugs like this, but it does get my mind away from the outside world. And everyone that had been watching gets back to their own things around the table and I go back to watching her as she kicks a leg up over me and watches all of it with reddened eyes and a smile on her face, occasionally adding into the group as they talk and laugh and smoke. I say nothing, only supervise.

The door opens at some point and closes again, and someone calls out, to which Mel pulls herself upright and calls right back, a long, drawn-out and slurred welcome.

This new arrival is welcomed by the group, handed a blunt, and promptly falls down right next to me and I have no time to consider inching a bit away before my vision is consumed by the reddest spray of hair I have seen in my life, and coming all across their face like dull fire. Am I bad at remembering names, but Raina sticks in my brain the second someone lets it between their teeth in that little room. And then they look at me, and there’s no introduction, no outstretched hand.

“Where are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your mind, it isn’t here. It’s left you. Do you know where it is?” And, like it simply isn’t worth their time, they reach over me to tuck their blunt in between girl of the day’s fingers, which she takes up to her mouth at the same time as she does the other one in her hand and attempts to inhale from both at once. 

Do I know where my mind is? Must have already taken a few hits of something before even showing up, I laugh to myself.

“You look like you’re in love or something. That’s gross.” They add, with a childish laugh.

“What?”

“Man, I don’t know. You seem out of it.”

“I’m the only sober one in this room!” They laugh harder at this. What a strange character. 

Mel lights her store-bought cake on fire when her hand comes close to one of the candles and she pulls away, dropping the lighter into the frosting, still lit, and the entire room erupts into laughter as I pull it out for her and singe my fingers as well. I know I’m laughing with them now even as I haven’t touched anything but water and have started wondering if second-hand highs are a thing to be considered. I know that I keep talking to this person, and they keep asking things, and I answer without any real thought to it, and the tip of a pen is cold against my skin where they begin to write a long string of numbers. Then they’ve disappeared, and I’m running my thumb over my pink knuckles wondering why it’s always my hands that I injure .

And more people disappear, and more, then the door opens and shuts upstairs long after the last person left, and I’m pulling myself upright despite the groans beside me to stay and start to collect ash and the butts of cigarettes off the floor and table and when a head pokes around the corner and immediately leaves once again. I feel guilty, like it’s all my doing.

“We have to get the smell out of there, you know.” His work clothes are still on and he stays upstairs, holding the back of his hand against his nose as I sweep by to grab a trash bag out of a cabinet. “And off of the two of you.”

“I’ll wash up when I get home, I’m just worried about her.”

“How is she?”

“Completely out.”

He goes out again, he’s on break, he tells me, smiling sweetly and asking me if I can take care of things. I say I can, and ignore the way he eyes the smudged ink covering most of my forearm.

I go through cans of air freshener in five minutes, clearing out all traces of there ever being anything down here but one very delirious teenage girl still stretched out on the couch like some kind of princess, and me, who falls down eventually at her side and cranes my head back to breathe. The two of us sit there for a long time, and at some point she crawls up on top of me and lays her bony arms all over my shoulders and falls back asleep.

I start to think about what they meant when they said I acted like I was in love. I mean, it’s plausible that - and then with me keeping such a close eye - Could they have meant Mel? Of course I know that if this was the case, they were wrong - I mean maybe I am in love with someone, but were they wrong about the subject of this manifest affection? 

I have to shift to accommodate her as her head presses into my neck inattentively, making a small sound into the collar of my jacket. My hand balls up the looseness of her t-shirt. I mean it must have been easy to misunderstand.

Must have been.

It’s terrible to realize, but I’m not even paying attention to her or her hands until I’m breathing up against them, or feel her thin lips pressing into mine. I wish I knew how to tell her she shouldn’t.

And then fear, for what will happen when I do stop returning her thoughtless kisses and address the fact that her elbow is biting my skin or that she’s still high and needs to relax. Where is my self-control now? Knowing that out of all else I have no self-control over, this is least of my worries?

I never get the chance to do any of those things, however, because then she’s off, wiping her nose with a sleeve and walking away, pulling on her shoes at the foot of the stairs and reaching inside a vase for a handful of cigarettes at the same time. I call back to her but she cuts me off.

“I need a smoke.” She drudges up the stairs like she’s been working to climb them forever. And I’m left with a bad taste in my mouth and the choices all laid out in front of me as whether to follow her or stay behind.

......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . .

I find her on the front step, shoes still on like she was planning on going somewhere but changed her mind, and a cigarette unlit in her hand.

“Forgot my lighter.” She laughs when I sit down a comfortable distance away, but makes no move back inside. And, in a moment of weakness, I don’t even reconsider stuffing my hand into my pocket and taking out the little silver box.

“Thanks.” She eyes me as she takes it, like she’s remembering something, and I begin to panic for the second time this night.

Mel turns back to me, and I’m already opening my hand, anxious to get it back in the safety of my pocket, but her hand is slow, and takes time to uncurl in a way that leaves me pushing away panic at the back of my mind. She couldn’t know whose it was. She’d have no way. What excuse do I have?

“You don’t smoke.” 

“Found it on my way here, actually.” I blurt out too fast but calm after realizing it’s only Mel and there’s no polygraph in sight. Her sudden sobriety caught me off guard, I guess.

“Hm.”

“Look, I’m sorry about what...happened in there.”

“You know what?” She gets back, settling down against the steps and pushing her shoes forward so that they scrape across the concrete. “Just don’t worry about it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Course I am. All my fault.” And then she kind of smiles like she did back there when I burned my fingers on her cake, and I feel a whole lot better.

That’s one of those places, I think. Not the basement from whence we came, with its delirium and smoke as much as simply the front step of someone’s house, someone who you came so close to losing forever but chose to follow up the stairs. It’s like I could sit here and think forever, even if at some point I do get up and wave goodbye and go home before it gets dark, it could all just be some dream, my real self still never allowed from the box that sits up on those steps or inside a car in the dead of night. My reality, a series of boxcars I go into one after another.

What did they mean when they said my mind was running away from me?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next chapter will not take as long as this one did i promise !


	9. angel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXHHqcNqllo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> coughs really loudly  
> im sorry this is bad  
> and i feel like...theres coding errors but....im tired

Maybe now is the appropriate time to mention something.

I get attached way too easily. If I think about it, I’m a little like those burrs that used to get stuck all over us when we’d go to the train or something. It's not exactly pleasant, kind of a nuisance, but you can't get it away too easily when it keeps sticking you in the finger.

If anything, I try to distance myself, and I kind of always have, but, as is easily interpreted by the past seven-ish months of my life...I'm pretty much shit at it. Maybe I need validation. Maybe I'm magnetic. Maybe, and this one I'm pretty sure about, I forgive too easily to ever find reason enough to completely extricate myself from anyone's life.

There's something important to be said about forgiveness. Forgiveness is...innately pure. It's the kind of thing that is ingrained into your skill set since kindergarten, or Sunday school for that matter. Forgive those who trespass against you, etcetera. 

The problem is, I am not conscious of how far you should take this mantra, and that is not a by-product of my over-dramatic clinginess but rather is probably one of the causes of it.

It’s also hard to know what is unhealthy when you’re so damn terrible at identifying issues. When the floor of your home is covered in glass that you just keep stepping over, wipe the blood off at the doormat, repeating the chant: “everything’s just fine”. I don’t mean to say I see no immorality in...the behavior I keep being witness to, but… Wouldn’t you rather just pretend not to notice? Everything just seems easier when you aren’t facing the facts. Or the way the facts make you want to bash someone’s head in. Wouldn't you much rather forgive and forget? Easy way out, isn't it?

I do two things when I get inside that night. First off I craw very ungracefully through my window, deciding whenever I do cross paths with him again, he may accept the story that I simply never left my room since the night before. 

And I write down the number that wraps crooked around my wrist and brings to mind the bright red hair and prying questions. It doesn’t even cross my mind what it should mean, but I write it down all the same. The numbers stare up at me from the page, bringing on a rush of nostalgia not invited nor particularly desired. 

I don’t particularly want to think about the last few hours, for that matter. Much rather get some sleep. Hope I forget my screw-up and everything preceding it in the morning.

Except I don’t. I wonder over it...busying myself with homework, gathering things to throw out from my room, admittedly not very many things, used notebooks and the half a dozen old birthday cards in the bottom of my desk. At the bottom sits a drawer I don’t recall filling and has me a bit dumbstruck before remembering the previous, recently departed owner. Old receipts, a dusty bible in flawless condition. A child’s picture. A largeish book of baby names. Meanings and origins included.

An excuse.

For some reason I could swear she hesitated at the phone before picking it up, even with no incrimination that it wasn't just taking a few extra seconds to reach the phone.

“Courageous.” A confused pause, that I bask in for no particular reason. It's only the kind of secret no one cares to know in the first place, I try and fail to remind myself. “That’s what it means.” My finger taps unconsciously against the penciled-in circle on the page. Neat, simply carefully drawn- a little too perfect, if I might add. “Kuvira.”

_“Fitting.”_

“You think so?”

_“Of course. I can’t talk to you right now.”_

“You’re right.”

“ _That’s not why- _” There’s some rustling, not the static kind. But then she sounds kind of forced.__

__“Okay.” Maybe I can talk to you later? Of course not._ _

__“ _I’m sorry, baby._ ”_ _

__“Baby?”_ _

__The rustling stops._ _

__“ _Justcallmelater._ ”_ _

__Dial tone.  
I hope she just doesn’t happen to be at home. I decide that I probably won’t call her later, just since she seems a bit of a mess. I wonder what over. _ _

__Boredom sets in, lukewarm and heavy, and I start to think about Mel. But I shouldn’t call her either. She wouldn’t like that. I start to crave something, human interaction, good conversation to take my mind off of -_ _

__Ah._ _

__There’s a lilt in their loud hello, bringing it up into a question. And then it occurs to me I can’t remember if we exchanged names at all._ _

__“Yeah, is this…?”_ _

__“ _Oh, it’s you._ ”_ _

__“Yeah, I…” And now my complete lack of skill when it comes to human interaction comes back to haunt me, not to any particular surprise. After all, my social life for the past few months has been either Mel, or...no that’s not exactly part of a social life. At any rate I stumble through several minutes of conversation, and then, well, I have plans set for the entire day with a strange, loud, androgynous stoner._ _

__And I feel strangely good about it. The four and a half minutes of intervention before I get out the door do little to change that, albeit leave me with slight frustration. _Where are you needing to be on a Sunday, only a few weeks before finals, when you already have work…_ I employ a certain level of diplomacy in order to keep our conversation from escalating before I have an opening to dart out the door and down the path._ _

__It takes a solid fifteen minutes on the city bus to get to the street I was told about, and an additional ten to find the specific address. It's easy to spot, with overgrown grass bracketing a cracked concrete pathway, a little like my house, but without the occasional abandoned bottle or extinguished cigarette.The windows are obscured by colorful drapes, behind which a shadow floats, then disappears.  
“Picked a hell of a day to call.” They comment from presumably the kitchen as I'm still stood in the center of the living room in awe._ _

__“Why is that?”_ _

__“Cobain’s dead.” Their throat audibly closes._ _

__“ _Nirvana_ Cobain?”_ _

__“Who else?” They appear back around the doorway, tossing a rolled newspaper my way. “Suicide.”_ _

__It is what the article reads. I feel like I need to be heartbroken, but I hardly knew who he was. Not like Su._ _

__I wonder if that had anything to do with her not wanting to talk to me earlier. Probably not. But then again…_ _

__It's strange to consider, as I kind of flash back to last December, taking that first cd out of her hand, the look on her face when I unwrapped it. And the person, the reason for all that, is dead, just like that._ _

__They come back, hand me the tea, and wave me towards one of the few couches planted at intervals in the cluttered space. We get to talking, it takes a while for conversation to stray from the late grunge king, but by the second collective teapot they spring a very specific question, like we've known each other long enough to be obligated to each others personal lives._ _

__“Who is this chick, now that you've mentioned her about three times?”_ _

__Panic starts to claw in but I get past it, looking around as noncommittal as I can manage._ _

__“Don't overthink it, it's not significant.”_ _

__“Obviously.” They start to stare. I know they're staring._ _

__“I'd rather not talk about it.” I swing, and miss._ _

__“Are you sure?”_ _

__“Yeah.”_ _

__“No.”_ _

__Pause._ _

__“Why am I about to tell you this?”_ _

__“You’re desperate.” They smile a little at the look I give. I bite my lip a little too hard._ _

__It's a moment of weakness, and it's all it ever took for me to spill it all. Well, a lot of it anyways. I like to imagine I spared most of the unsavory details._ _

__“I can't even say how I feel about it all.” Fuck, it's suddenly too much like therapy. Someone I don't really know, listening in on my life's problems. “I feel like I'm very much emotionally invested in her, but what do I know, right?”_ _

__“Head over heels. They pronounce simply, biting the inside of their cheek. “Moonstruck, in fact.”_ _

___On the contrary, she is the train tracks I am perpetually flying off of._ I leave that out. _ _

__“That's a little naive-sounding -It’s just that I have trouble living without the fake comfort and...forced intimacy.”_ _

__“Gods.”_ _

__“I'm much more cynical, at least.”_ _

__For no reason associated with this topic, I ask where their bathroom is soon after that, and am directed down a short hall with a doorway blocked by a beaded curtain._ _

__I stare at myself in the mirror for a long time. I wonder what I'm doing. I need to be careful, at least wait until I know I can trust this person, that they won’t do something dumb like call social services before they even know who we are. But for some reason, I find myself trusting them. Even with the bathtub behind me full of some suspiciously luminous fluid and their weird way of roping me in._ _

__I realize as I step over a rune in the doorway how completely _normal_ Raina seems for this house, but I'm hardly back before they're giving me another question, and the thought leaves my head._ _

__“Do you think you'll ever open up about this whole affair?”_ _

__“I'm afraid of what it would cause.”  
“And your father?”_ _

__“He might seriously kill me.”_ _

__“Shit.”_ _

__“Sometimes I wish I had the power to just fix everything, you know?” They twirl their hair around on their fingers and I allow myself to get lost in the motion, still talking without much thought. “All I want is for us to be happy, maybe together. And to have my father out of the picture. Mostly just for her to be happy like she was before I got in the way.”_ _

__“It doesn’t sound like she was unhappy, actually it’s kind of like your sudden appearance completely reunited her with a whole...anarchist, wildhearted part of herself.”_ _

__“That sounds ridiculous. And untrue.”_ _

__They shrug, just like that._ _

__“It’s not that ridiculous. She only wanted to start tagging again after you showed up, didn’t you say?”_ _

__“That’s not exactly something to be proud of-”_ _

__“In this case. It's a subconscious thing, a unity, what you are and what you think you're supposed to be. “ their fingers threading together, they look straight over my head. “Uniting. Neat thing. And _your_ doing.”_ _

__At this point, I no longer follow them, and they have a spacey look in their eyes that suggests I haven’t even been brought along for the ride._ _

__“You know,” A thought pops right up as I finger one of the yarn tassels on the blanket that hangs over the couch, unexpected and never really something I’ve thought about, much less something that will help my cause. They look at me, curious with chin in their slender fingers. “Her voice, when she gets really worked up, it goes all husky, it’s the cutest thing.” They groan, and I laugh. The tea has kind of been making me feel some things. I’d say it was spiked with something, but it probably isn't. Placebo._ _

__It’s kind of creepy if I think too hard about it. I like to take long detours home, sometimes walking through new neighborhood, but more often than not hers. It was total accident the first time, of course I couldn't even remember how to get to her house, but once I knew...I couldn't stop walking past it. Something comforting about the place._ _

__It’s not completely stalking, though. Sometimes I see Huan, the kid with the questionable gender and mephistophelian cat, who seems to like me in his odd gothic way, and likes to ask me when I walk by if I've done more of the painting._ _

__I already hear him now, on my way back a few days later, voice lifting over a softer one, and the implications of that one other voice have me crossing to the other side of the street in the half-hope that I can slip by unnoticed._ _

__“Be gentle with her!”_ _

__“I _am!”_ Hearing them always ignites a small burst of fear in me, especially when it's not just Huan, who I trust. _ _

__“Kuvira!” I pretend not to have noticed him, turning to cross the street as he pulls a disgruntled Shiva from the arms of a girl, maybe a few years younger. She seems to hide behind him as he moves across the yard to sit at the edge of a low stone wall, her wide eyes dedicated to avoiding me._ _

__“How's it going?”_ _

__He's definitely not his usual, sullen self today, and he answers me smiling, the sideways sweep of his bangs threatening to obscure his eyes._ _

__“Great!”_ _

__I let my eyes drift towards his shadow, who’s stiff as a statue now and still refusing to look my way. He gets a bit closer. “She’s just shy. And a bit sad.”_ _

__“Sad?”_ _

__“She...really liked Nirvana.”_ _

__“Wow.”_ _

__Shiva slips between his arms and coils around my foot as he begins to talk, changing the subject as his sister shoots him a heartbreaking look and runs back behind the trees._ _

__“I'm actually really excited, I just got permission to transfer schools next year.”_ _

__“To where?”_ _

__“The one you're going to. I was afraid they wouldn't take me, being a charter and all that, but Mom talked them into it, of course.”_ _

__Shiva purrs into my leg, and in a bout of fearlessness I bend down and stroke the top of her head. She leans into it. I feel strangely blessed. Huan seems to think so, too, and from where she's hidden in the back of the yard, his sister looks at me jealous from around a book._ _

__“I'm happy for you.”_ _

__“It kinda sucks you and my brother will be graduated before I start, but we've never been that...nice to each other anyways. No big deal.”_ _

__I nod._ _

__“Why are you leaving the school you're at now?”_ _

__“Fights.” He answers without a beat. My heart goes out to him._ _

__“You start them?”_ _

__He looks at me and his gloom has blossomed back in him like some morbid metaphor, his voice reduced to its normal lowered pitch._ _

__“Would you understand?”_ _

__“I think so.”_ _

__He looks away and suddenly he's years older than a fourteen-year-old innocently playing with his cat, I can't tell how much, but it's there._ _

__“My new school doesn't have the art program that I want.” His voice readjusts, falling somewhere in between low and higher as his eyes flit around the street. “But I'll get by. Mom said it would be good for me, being where she can protect me. She likes to protect me.”_ _

__I badly want to stop myself from answering._ _

__“She likes protecting me too.”_ _

__......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . ._ _

__

__“You’re on thin ice, dude. Talking to her kid? It’s bold”_ _

__“It’s not bold. We’ve met before.” I say mostly to myself. “He’s almost my age, at any rate.”_ _

__“And if she were to find out? Her husband, maybe?”_ _

__“That’s not a concern of mine.”_ _

__They scoff, something I could probably take offence at if I was a little more awake._ _

__“You two just need a talk.”_ _

__“Kind of hard to get one of those.”_ _

__“Because you're always afraid of each other. Just talk to her, I don’t know what else to say.”_ _

__“Sure.”_ _

__Not only do I ignore their advice, I go so far as to explicitly avoid her, focusing on my partner during practice, learning to like Kenzie like one might learn to like their horrible acne, building confidence in her presence until I operate just as smooth as I ever did before I started fawning all over you-know-who._ _

__“Are you nervous?”_ _

__And that’s the problem with performing. One second, it’s weeks, and in the blink of an eye, I’m sat backstage, looking down at the hardened skin of my palms, wondering if I need to bandage a healing spot where I impulsively tore away my callous._ _

__I guess I never really noticed everyone had gone off somewhere else. I think I remember Mel leaving at some point, but when I turn around the almost complete vacancy of the space around me comes as a surprise._ _

__She looks gorgeous, even though I can’t pinpoint anything in particular that picks up the thrum under my crossed arms. I’m trying not to look, but I still do, through the mirror, like it’ll save me from turning to stone when she looks right back._ _

__“Not particularly.” There’s no hint in her expression that gives away how little she trusts in that, but I can still tell it’s not a firm belief of hers. It helps me to lift my head a little higher, focus on myself in the mirror until I think I might look vaguely confident. Which I am...about the performing. Not so much how long I can deal with her walking up to stand behind me, wrapping fingers up in my hair like she’s familiar with the action._ _

__I still don’t know, it’s so slight I can’t even tell. Something to do with her hair looking especially perfect, or extra attention to the sharp curve of her eyeliner, it’s a careful sabotage, like she knows all these little things make me want to drive my arm into a wall, but not enough that I'd really do it._ _

__“Are you sure?”_ _

__“Maybe.” She smiles just the same, and her fingers find some structure at the base of my head and stay there, a question posed in her look,_ _

__“Go ahead.”_ _

__“I just don’t want it to get in the way, it could be a distraction.” I nod, trying to not watch as her fingers start to twist, how she looks down calmly, doesn’t make eye contact again. “You shouldn’t worry.” A hairband on her wrist slides over and around the end of her long and almost-perfect braid. I can’t help but wonder how she ever got so good at that, since I can’t think of anyone who braids their hair in the class or otherwise… But then who am I to assume I know everyone in her entire life? It’s a bit funny, I mean, for all I know there could be five more girls with too-long hair that needs to be pulled back. Maybe that’s a bit too far, but maybe I’m really onto her._ _

__“Okay, i’m worrying.” I blurt out around the time she starts ghosting her fingers all around as she tucks back the strands that she missed, haunting me so terribly I just need to get something out. As if it does much good other than giving her more excuse to pull over the next chair and continue to watch me for my next slip-up._ _

__“What worries you?”_ _

__“Hard to tell.”_ _

__“You’ll do great.” My hand clenches around the countertop at the tone she starts to use, the fucking familiar tone I can’t respond to, only watch her hand come up behind my own. “You know I have complete faith in you.”_ _

__It might be right for me to answer her,but It doesn’t happen, not after my hand is lifted between hers and held up against her face just so I feel her breath on the clamminess of my palm._ _

__“And if I don’t?”_ _

__“Then nobody will even notice.” She smiles when I do, lips brushing against my loose fist, grips my palm not too firmly. “Just don’t drop Kenzie.” “Or fall, yourself.” My laughter punctuates her claims, more and more extreme. “Break everything.” “Get me fired.” “Next thing you know I’m running from the police and you’re both in those full-body casts…”_ _

__“Someone could come in.” I get out, about the same time I start to wonder all the reasons not to just fall forward and see if she’d catch me. Also about the same time that she kisses the back of my hand, in that way that makes me not at all want to walk out on a stage, and more so want to watch just to see what she might do next, eyes closed, kind of covetous and slow about it._ _

__“Do you think so?”_ _

__I’m stronger than that, aren’t I? Christ._ _

__“Why are you like this?” That definitely does it._ _

__“I don’t know.” My hand is mine again, but it may as well be a phantom, like I know it does not belong in open space. It stays busy with the edge of the countertop, running along a crack in the linoleum from some wild, backstage antic. “Kuvira?”_ _

__There’s a sudden rush of sound coming from beyond the stage door, signifying the closure of the last performance. Who was it again? Funny that I can’t even remember that much._ _

__“We’re going to be up soon.”_ _

__“I’m sorry.”_ _

__“Don’t worry about it.”_ _

__“No, I-”_ _

__The door opens, and ordinarily it would be a little weird for me to snap around like that in surprise, but it’s Mel, and some others, and I meet her in a mostly-her embrace while pretending not to feel her nails dig into my bare arms. And not to feel slightly cheated. I didn’t want to end our conversation like we did._ _

__“Break some legs out there.”_ _

__“You too.” But there's nothing else to be done. Put it out of your mind. I don’t stay for any more pep talk, wander down the hallway instead while I refocus myself on the task at hand, until I’m called back. I also take care to remove the lipstick from my hand._ _

__The performance itself is no big deal. Maybe a little strenuous, but just like the last twelve times. There’s this moment, a split second, fifteen feet in the air, where I look off to my right, and it’s kind of hard to see in the dark but after wrapping myself tighter and finding someone’s wrist I sneak another glance over, indulge in the expression on her face, pride, maybe, but don’t I want to believe I see some trace of undying love?_ _

__I’m ridiculous. Must be the altitude._ _

__I feel like I sink in deep water, the moment I step off the stage and can’t find her. She’s already gone. After all that? Of course. Of course, of course, of course._ _

__But, even through it all, I know how hard it'll be to forgive myself if I don’t try, at least, to find her. So I try. I go through everywhere I can think to look, all the while trying to pull my hair out of its tight braid. It feels like it’s suffocating me. Everything feels like it’s suffocating me. Flinching at the pain, I realize I”ve started taking it out on myself, and focus for a second on calming down as every place I look is still empty and dead and devoid of what I search for like the sunlight through a tomb, never ending and full of other people all wanting out just like I do._ _

__I sink further, lose sight of the last flicker of light, even as I find the side door to the building and move my search outside, taking a look to either side before tripping down the icy steps. Then find it rising in front of me like a phoenix, stretching out luminous wings over the desolate horizon._ _

__Her back is to me, the phoenixlike sunrise no more than the flicker of her lighter eerily illuminating her hands as she walks. She doesn’t seem to be rushed, rather that she has all the time in the world, unconsciously setting one foot in front of the other as she fails once again to light the cigarette before the breeze drags out the flame. The dull click that comes with each time her shoes come into contact with the misshapen concrete seems to resonate off the walls on either side of us._ _

__“Su.”_ _

__She stops abruptly, as if the last few steps have been the last stages of her mechanical winding down. Drops the hand still holding her fresh cigarette and lets it smoulder lazily in the breeze._ _

__“Kuvira- ” She turns, and then stops of her own accord, as if she just can’t bring out another word. I feel like maybe I shouldn’t. Her fingers tighten on the strap of her bag, cigarette completely forgotten, glowing in the wash of each gust of wind, but never extinguishing._ _

__If i’ve never truly felt limbo before, I feel it now. The silent moment when all my options are laid out clearly at my feet, and I am left with a choice. And at the same time... none at all. As if I’m once again in that dusky auditorium, in rapid freefall from a silk waterfall, hand waiting for my stop, my grasp._ _

__My hand on her shoulder. Her, standing in the shadows, arms crossed, face screaming with a thousand emotions even upside down and half-concealed by curtain ropes. A grasp._ _

__“You're going to pretend that didn’t happen?”_ _

___“Yes.”_ _ _

__“How can you?”_ _

__“I apologized, didn’t I?”_ _

__“I…” It’s very obviously tense in the space between us, what with the way we both look down it might even seem visible, a thick, vaporous barrier. “ wanted...that back there. I just didn’t want to be discovered.”_ _

__“No, of course - It’s good that you did.” She takes my hand away gently from where I feel like I’ve forgotten it, lets it fall back against my side. There’s only resignation in her expression. “It shouldn’t have happened like that.”_ _

__“Then how?”_ _

__“Not at all.”_ _

__“You can say that?” I can hardly say I’m surprised, anyways._ _

__“What else am I supposed to say?”_ _

__Her cigarette burns quietly as she holds it out, kind of like she’s not even conscious of it there in her hand. I’m almost anxious over it, like its presence was up to me, and here i’ve just handed it to her or something. As if I have so much power and no other way to use it. I try an answer, but it’s hardly audible, and I know she doesn’t quite catch it. No other way to use it._ _

__In a weird moment I’m stepping forwards, and one of her hands comes up to my wrist as I do but not at any attempt of restraint. My hands again find my tether, this time at the very edges of her jawline, fingers longing to twist in the strands that would usually curl around to frame her face. I feel like every ounce of bravery in my blood is being strained to the breaking point, rushing through my veins hurriedly so that everything seems to be set into a state of motion. And I need it, every drop of it, not like I needed it for the performance, not even for my father in the back of that dark audience._ _

__I kind of wish she would open her eyes, allow me some comfort. I can’t even tell this way if she’s flinching or just...existing. I kind of just exist for a second too, reveling in a quiet moment where I let my fingers trace the edge of her jaw, my thumb carefully coming up the line of it, the soft edge of her chin. God, I’ve really _missed_ her. Missed this. Simply the way her face feels under my hands. Every detail that I have been denied all this time, my thirst for it has been inexorably tormenting, down to the light line that indents the bridge of her nose, or the perfect shape of her mouth. Everything I’ve turned myself to not notice or remember. God._ _

__Her lips against mine feel nothing short of exhilarating, but at the same time...warm, and familiar. The slight intake of her breath is so much the same, as if nothing has happened at all in the past few months, and we’re still us, and we’ve never broken away from each other at all. I pull away slowly, and she follows unhesitantly and earnestly._ _

__This is it, my apex, the moment I feel as if i’ve been preparing for after all this time. The moment is so uncomplicated, so simple, but to me it is amazing, the entire universe, in all its extravagance and glory, manifested within one perfect scene.  
I hear a sound a few feet back, around where the door would be, and instinct drives me back against the shadow of the wall. She looks back at me, terrified._ _

__“I thought I heard something.” And even though I know it makes me sound unserious about the whole thing, I quickly add: “I'm sure it wasn't anything.”_ _

___“Kuvira.”_ _ _

__“No, I promise. Just paranoid.”_ _

__But one thing does rise to the surface soon enough, as ridiculous as it sounds. I haven’t even brought my jacket out with me. The puff of steam that billows out to the side of me is a perfect reminder of that, that I have flung myself out here in nothing but the tank top I performed in. God, it’s stupid. How one second I start to shiver, and when I open my eyes and look down into that space between us I realize I’ve been standing still for a very long time, one hand still on her shoulder, one of hers still on my wrist, no words shared between us._ _

__But as much as I know I am, I might barely notice the cold. Not here, not with her, feeling like the sun incarnate under my hands, warm in her security and familiarity. Maybe this would be the case, you know, if I actually touched her at all. It's entirely possible I daydreamed our whole dumb, overdramatic kiss._ _

__“You’re shivering.”_ _

__It’s a hand on my arm that proves me wrong, and the stoic look in her eyes, the firmness of her grip-- brings me back. Touches me to the ground, and leaves me, two feet on the solid stage with nowhere else to go._ _

__“I’m not--”_ _

__“Yes you are. Go...get a jacket or something.”_ _

__Curtain. The next few moments are hazy, as if I’m not fully there, still somewhere in the past, clinging to the remnants of my perfect ending with no regard for the sequel. Our words are harsh, commands and pleas, hands still on eachother like they won’t let go, still close enough. Eyes are soft and apologetic for the hardness of the words we swing back and forth at each other._ _

__“ _I don’t care.”__ _

___“I have to go.”_ _ _

___“Don’t.”_ _ _

___“I have to.”_ _ _

___“Please.”_ _ _

___“Kuvira._ ”_ _

__I don’t even remember walking away, just that I was suddenly alone, and I could still feel her on me, feel her eyes them sucking me dry the farther away I got. Hear those last, stressed words in my ears, the tone of her frustration, whether it be with me or simply just herself. For risking that much, with so many people around._ _

__The lobby is deserted when I walk back in, empty, but for one man and a single table scattered with forgotten and folded programs. It makes me feel miniscule. Faced with this big, open expanse of room, just me, a shell of a person with no shoes and messy hair and a open socket where a heart used to be, where I tore it out and stuffed it into an open pocket while we were too occupied with each other’s mouths to notice._ _

__I go straight across and realize right away that he smokes a cigarette, all but one finger on the thin shaft. I find myself no longer worrying about my expression or the weight of my voice, as if he would have the slightest idea what caused any way I act here, anyways._ _

__“I’ll just get my stuff.”_ _

__“Good idea.” He raises it, sticks it between his lips. Looks down at me. I suddenly have the desire to rip it from his mouth, crushing it on the stupid, abstractly-patterned carpeting._ _

__“Well…” I’m still shivering from the cold outside, and it’s almost that I force myself motionless as I word a single question. “What did you think?”_ _

__There’s no hurtling half-burned cigarettes at the ground, only transfer to a hand, the tapping of ash that blends with the carpet pattern._ _

__I know why I hate him smoking. I know why I hate the way he smokes, carelessly puffing through cartons of nicotine like a steam train._ _

__It’s just that this is the one, singular thing they share, that they both hang on the edges of. They are in the exact same boat, and I hate that. Hate that because I love the way she smokes, love the way she holds a cigarette, love the silent regret as much as it saddens me. Hate the insolence of other people who waste their lives away on cigarettes without a care as to what it does to them, like it's some kind of travesty to every aspect of her struggle._ _

__He raises it again, as if to taunt me._ _

__“I was under the impression those late-night rehearsals were you out getting stoned or God knows what.”_ _

__“What does that mean?”_ _

__He laughs, but it only seems mocking, false. I don’t know._ _

__“You proved me wrong, kid. Means you’re damn good, I guess. I sure as hell couldn't do that kind of thing.”_ _

___It’s enough that I smile. Kind of forget all that rocky ground between us or my anger at his smoking and go back with him straight-faced._  
There's something off. I know it's there, and I know he's only waiting for is to get inside to let it run rampant over him. I just hope it isn't so bad something...I don't know, happens. I'm very tired.  
“I got some interesting information from someone while you were packing up.” He doesn't waste a second from getting inside, I'm hardly halfway across the room when I'm grabbed roughly by the shoulder and spun around and he's already adopted that tone, that superiority tone, the I-am-the-one-who-gives-you-orders tone. 

__“What?”_ _

__“Some girl came by while I was waiting for you, said you were out doing something I wouldn't like.” Christ, the _door.__ _

__So, at least _he_ didn't see. That's at least something, right? Room for convincing. Except, for some reason,some part of me is not wanting to take that easy way out. That's right, I am so used to denying the existence of what seems to be what I've built my entire self around and I am _tired.__ _

__“And what might that be?”_ _

__“You'd make me say it?” He leans in, makes a brief motion as if to pull me closer but decides against it, spits his words out in such a dramatic way I come close to laughing. “It's _the devil’s work.”__ _

__“It's all mine, actually.”_ _

__“How long has this been going on?” It's the fault of adrenaline that I don't plan my answers careful as I should, instead saying what comes to mind, fighting the tiny, ever-growing urge to result to violence._ _

__“Always.” You’d think I’d just come out and proclaimed my satanism, the way he gets all flustered._ _

__“I won't let you be pulled into that. You'll go to counseling or something like that, I need to think about it.”_ _

__I open my mouth to return the obvious “no I don't think I will.” But he's already there._ _

__“As long as you live with me you will. Lord help me I’d rather have you stayed with that boy!” I attempt a lunge for the stairs, but his arm comes out and pushes me to the wall, where the side of my head cracks on the corner of a picture frame._ _

__“Then I won't live with you any longer.” I'm slapping his hand away where it lunges for me one last time, knowing it will only enrage him further. “If it’s an issue.”_ _

__“You have nowhere else to go.”_ _

__“Anywhere would be better.” It's a thin line I pick my way across, easing my way closer to the staircase in the hope that I can make a break for it at some point, but still without using physical force to get there. “You’re stifling me so much, I can’t even bear to be around you.”_ _

__“Don't say that.”_ _

__I shrug. There's a weird tone in his voice, a low growl. I'm on the bottom step, moving backwards._ _

__“I'll send you off to one of those camps before you can even open the damn window.”_ _

__Second step._ _

__“You couldn't.”_ _

__“I'd do it. For your own good.”_ _

__Third, fourth. He reaches the first. I'm shaking my head, trying valiantly to steady my breathing._ _

__Fifth, sixth._ _

__And I keep going. He doesn't follow.  
I found something tonight, as I sit in my room with my packed bag and count my money. My finger drags against the words I’m already getting down, sweating and smudging, but down. Every thing that I have thought about goes down, a web of epiphany documented and ready. For what? Nothing in particular. For the hour I told myself to wait before escaping. Maybe I'd leave it for him to find. Wouldn’t that be dramatic?_ _

__I don't believe anything he said, of course. He couldn't even stay awake an hour past me locking myself up._ _

__I pick up the phone like second nature as I adjust my backpack under my hair, not sparing a thought to what might happen if I’m caught. I don’t even think to hide, I just dial, stand there in the dark where I used to be afraid to walk at night, because of whatever nocturnal monsters waiting to set their teeth into me. I wait for the tone to cut out, wait for the “hello” that doesn’t come, but sends silence in its stead._ _

__The line vibrates with a sigh, I wonder if I should speak first._ _

__“Can you come over?”_ _

__There’s another long pause, marked by nothing but a stretch of silence, the pounding of my heart in my chest, the twinge of guilt that runs away the minute I catch it defiling my thoughts. Then._ _

__“ _Kuvira, no._ ”_ _

__My heart leaps that I get that far. As far as those two words, however scathing they are otherwise. The little things don’t scare me like they used to. The creaking of bedsprings in the other room, the sound of the fridge whirring up, gusts of wind. I am impervious._ _

__“Come on.”_ _

__“ _I’m sorry, it was a momentary thing, I don’t know what to say._ ”_ _

__“Know.” My voice cracks all too suddenly, a small shatter that is unplanned and terrible and I gulp it down right away, but I know that she’s heard, know by her immediate response. It almost ignites a small fire of guilt somewhere deep inside, but I gulp that down too._ _

__“ _Don’t do this._ ”_ _

__“Okay.”_ _

__“ _Kuvira, I swear to whoever the fuck is out there - I can’t do this._ ”_ _

__“Okay. It’s okay.”_ _

__Getting out is second nature, a simple slide out the window and across the front lawn, but I use the front door this time in a small exercise of my newly-adopted authority over my own life. Besides, I'm a little too tired to be sneaking around, I guess. And I've started to get a bit worried._ _

__I make the four blocks to their house in what is probably record time anyways, where they leave me outside the door for the duration of several knocks._ _

__

__“Tell me it isn’t true.” What isn’t true?_ _

__Reality, it hits me like a sledgehammer. I remember her fingernails, digging so angrily into my skin, and I know who caused this, and I know what they spread. It might be a little stupid for it to take so long to figure out, but looking back, it’s crystal._ _

__“I need to talk to her. Mel, I need to talk to her.”_ _

__From the next room, someone starts to yell something offensive, and, as if he was looking for an opening, Max disappears from in front of me. Walking into the living room, I catch the top of his head as it disappears down the stairs._ _

__“Mel.”_ _

__She looks up at the ceiling._ _

__“I'm serious.”_ _

__Nothing. She's bad at ignoring people, anyways. I manage to wrestle the cigarette away from her, and she glares at me, hand still raised._ _

__I know what I want to ask. What did you hear? For that matter, what did you see? You were the one at the door? How long, for the love of god?_ _

__“Does he know it was her?”_ _

__Her surprise is slightly evident, but aside from the minutely raised eyebrows she still looks ready to murder me._ _

__“Of course not.” She says so quiet and with a little shake of her head, maybe a bit offended that this is the question I choose, I can’t really tell._ _

__“Thank you.”_ _

__“Idiot, like I would do that to her.” She calls again as I turn to leave. And I do leave, so easily. It’s so simple to do, even though I have zero idea where I may be heading, or if i’ll ever be able to turn back...or so I tell myself, the 1.50 bus money in my pocket and the 274 in an envelope in my backpack doesn’t make me incapable of turning back, after all. But where else could I go?_ _

__My thought is cut short by the robotic sentences that ring out over my head and tell me my stop is coming up._ _

__It takes them a few minutes to get to the door, a few minutes that I spend debating whether to try and cover the small bruise I feel forming on my temple. I end up resolving to forget it, and they appear in the doorway messy-haired and delirious._ _

__Amazing, amazing Raina lets me in their house without a second thought, lets me collapse on the couch, and even brings me a cup of tea while I lament about my problems. Mostly Su. I don't want to bring up Mel, not now. I think about asking some questions they might be able to answer, but by the time they come to me I don’t really feel up to any further opening of the heart.  
“It hurt me, you know? That she wouldn’t even-” I almost tip over the mug while setting it down, and for a second my panic relieves me of my train of thought. _ _

__“Spare you the time of day.”_ _

__“After everything. Like someone ripped my life vest right off my shoulders.”  
“Will you forgive her?”_ _

__“I already have.” The accompanying laugh is dry and thoughtless._ _

__“You think so highly of her.” They blurt out suddenly, mouth rushing to keep up with a sudden thought as they quickly set aside the cup. “I've got it. I've got it.”_ _

__“What have you got?”_ _

__“She’s an angel to you, that’s what it is.”_ _

__“That’s ridiculous.” They look as if caught in epiphany, but not one that seems terribly viable._ _

__“She is! She’s your angel and you’re -” They make a vague, spastic gesture. “ -playing god!”_ _

__“What does that have to do with anything?” Playing God. What a concept. Over-exaggeration, at best. At any rate, they appear thoroughly convinced of this, and not so ready for any convincing otherwise. I leave it alone._ _

__“What does that mean?” I try again after they’ve settled down a bit._ _

__“I don't know. Something to do with building someone up so big in your mind or something, I'd have to write it down. Like that unity thing. Anyways, she’s hardly any _angel.”__ _

__“Aren't I a little young for a god complex?”_ _

__“It hardly matters at the root of it all, though, doesn't it?” They laugh at me, momentarily frustrating before they shut out my response._ _

__“Give it a rest, Romeo. And get some rest, while you’re at it.” They spring up from their seat so fast I start to wonder if I really sound so terrible. “Sounds like you’ve had a very long day.”_ _

__Jesus. I guess I am kind of a wreck. It’s even hard to manage the weak “thanks” to the blanket tossed my way, trying to seem as grateful as I really am. I’m allowed one last, sympathetic glance, and then the light goes off.  
_“She’s hardly an angel.”__ _

__I have to think about that for a while, let it roll around on the tip of my tongue. It surprised me, when I heard it, but i’ve been so out of it, I hadn’t really let it stick like it tries to do now, clinging inside my mind like a bad memory. Hardly an _angel_. I guess I never really thought about that in context. That’s a little bit too dramatic, isn’t it? Do I think of Su as an angel? Was there a time that I did, if not so much anymore?_ _

__I linger on the emphasis of that word. Angel. As if I had her raised to that pedestal for all to see, and had to be reminded of the fact that she might not be so worthy of it. I can’t have._ _

__Angel. Don’t make me laugh._ _

__......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . ._ _

__The morning marks the first time, as far as I remember, that I’ve woken up in the morning not in my bed. It’s strange when I think about it. That I’d never slept over at someone’s house, never visited a far-away relative - spent every living night, thousands of them, in the same bed in the same room in the same house. And now? Will I ever go back?_ _

__My need to escape is back, the running-off-into-the-forest need. Then the claustrophobia. I take a quick shower, count out my bus fare, and tell Raina I'm off to ask my mother about letting me move early. I'm not entirely sure if it's the best idea, but I haven't missed a day of school yet, and with the performance over, I could theoretically...not go back._ _

__It's not like I need to say goodbye to any friends. And most of my things are already with her. I call to be sure she's okay with me coming over, and then I'm out, one backpack, all my cash, and the warmth of a particularly heartfelt indefinite-farewell hug._ _

__My thoughts are on Mel, almost the whole bus ride._ _

__It should have come earlier, knowing her. In fact, I can hardly imagine why it took her so long to do what she did, since she no doubt knew about it._ _

__This freeway is familiar. I can try to ignore it, but it's obvious. The strip off to the side, that one sign kind of bent...and if i’m not mistaken…_ _

__The bus driver looks very tired, borderlining consciousness, in fact, so I think it does good when I walk over and tap him on the shoulder._ _

__"Let me out up here, will you?"_ _

__He looks at me with the dull eyes of someone who has probably heard this one a few times, so I pull out my envelope of cash and slide a twenty onto the dashboard._ _

__"Kid, there isn't a stop here."_ _

__"Just pull over real fast. You don't even have to stop all the way." He kind of sighs, shakes his head. "I'll jump out either way."_ _

__He rolls his eyes at my nod right before I step off, and then I'm alone._ _

___But it's familiar territory, very familiar, a few hundred yards back and then towards the trees. At this point the tracks are just there, a few feet in front, and i step forward until the toe of my shoe comes into contact with something hard and metallic that rolls forward awkwardly a few inches. It’s a can of paint, something we might have dropped and forgotten in the dark so long ago. I pick it up, shake it, hear the clacking sound of the contents._  
It was really amazing, actually, what we did. It was so easy to forget, amid all the shit we turned into, and then we lost the time to come down, and then forgot altogether. I’m no artist, but it’s definitely something worth all those sleepless nights. At least I think so. It’s kind of started to give me a sinking feeling.  
Another step and I come atop one of the metal rails, hingeing on the tightrope of self-destruction, thin soles curving around the strip. If I don’t look down, then close my eyes, it kind of feels like floating. Reality, askew. I feel a bit like I am the train wreck, and if i’m being honest with myself, rightfully so. 

__I know every rustle in the grass, every gush of wind, every car passing could be her. But it won’t. Su made it perfectly clear she had no desire to even talk to me, and I get the sense that she had her mind made up. It’s just me out here, and a half-painted over, rusty train car. Even if she somehow found out about my untimely departure, who's to say she'd even think to come all the way out here?_ _

__It’s strangely easy to mount the precarious little ladder on the side, and I make it up to the roof single-handedly, though a little rust-smeared._ _

__I stay there for a while, lay out my backpack as a pillow and stare into the foliage, reveling in the nostalgia and the comforts of solitude. Another car whizzes past at whatever-miles above the speed limit, and another, this time slow, and accompanied with the swish of the grass just off the curbside._ _

__“What are you up to?” Pure fear prevents me from answering, or looking over the side - thinking she's just a part of my overactive imagination. She's looking over the side a distance away, leaned up against the side of the car. I don't get down, not yet, but look back at her, swinging my legs over the side, and call back the same greeting._ _

__She looks concerned. She probably should be, anyways, the state I must be in._ _

__“What happened?”  
“Nothing happened. We just had a fight. I don't think I should go back, either.”_ _

__“Does he know?”_ _

__“He doesn't know about you.”_ _

__It's a nod, extremely slight but still so revealing of the weight lifting away at those words. I can't help but sympathize. I'm not the only one who might face some serious shit for this, we both know that. Maybe her more than me.  
“I want to get out of here, you know. I’m restless.”_ _

__She looks at me. I feel it. I keep distracting myself._ _

__“I don’t know. Out of here. Far away, maybe a couple hundred miles.” She gets that I can’t look on her face, the one I know._ _

__“I'll go with or without you” it's a lie. “But I wouldn't know where i'd be going.”_ _

__We look at each other for what feels like a long time, me daring her to say no, I can't, I won't. A bit of optimism bursts into bloom somewhere within me, as our silence drags on, and all she asks me is:_ _

__“How long?”_ _

__“Long as it takes.”_ _

__“It's Friday. We have to be back before anyone has reason to suspect.” Damn, a whole garden flowers inside me at those words as the door is jerked open. “You're lucky I miss you so badly.”_ _

___I can contain the happiness, but I can't deny how it bursts up all over. Even though I know how right it feels, like this is where I need to be, maybe where we both need to be._  
“Do you know where we’re going?” She looks down from where she's been caught reading a sign kind of obviously. I mean, we haven't made a plan. She has, though, I can tell.  
“I never took you to the ocean.” Her hands loosen from their grip on the wheel, which is when I notice how tight exactly she had started to hold it. “We're going to have to stop, though, I've been driving all day.” I realize if I ever finished my driving classes, I could be taking over. 

__“At a motel, maybe?” Yeah.  
It’s about an hour later that we pull up to a little, neon-lit motel off the side of the freeway. It looks a bit sketchy, but I don’t think either of us really notice. I can't really sleep at all, though, and I end up staring at the back of her head across the room for what feels like a few solid hours - in reality, probably around fifteen minutes. _ _

__I start to think about what he’s doing around now. Ten thirty - I bet he’s drinking. And, shit, my mother probably still expects me to be there at some point. Maybe I’ll call her in the morning, tell her I changed my mind, or had to tend to something or… Would she call him to ask where I was? Is it possible that he wasn’t bluffing about what he’d do if I left? What if he _told her?_ Would I be out of living arrangements?_ _

__I’m so lost in all this speculation, I forget to pretend to be asleep when I hear her turn across the room, and when I look back she’s looking over a shoulder, straight at me. I imagine she asks something, but I don’t hear anything but the distant sound of a siren and the air conditioner in the next room over. Then, as I’m still wondering if should say something, or if she will, she moves further away, still silent, and makes a vague, inquiring gesture between me and the open space. I’m out of the bed so fast I get lightheaded._ _

__I wonder very briefly what happened to make it so simple to just suddenly be sharing a bed, but I know it’s late, and we’re both very tired, and in the end I owe my own courage up to her being turned away and not fixating me with one of her questioning looks about the same time I drift away from consciousness._ _

__I sleep for hours. Days. It's been nearly a week since I've slept that soundly. In fact, I don't think I woke up once during the night._ _

__That’s why consciousness is so hard. See, I don't remember the last night, I don't remember if I moved. I don't remember if she moved. But one of us did._ _

__It takes a second for me to take stock of the situation: an arm draped over my shoulders, another pair of legs laced under the blankets with my own, my hand full of someone's hair. I dare to move my head back and find her face close to where the side of my neck was a moment ago._ _

__I shift so carefully, still met with the waking tighten around my entire body that indicates my failure to be careful enough. I stay still after that, but it doesn't take long at all until I feel her move again, and my mind races with what I do, what I say when she raises her head and searches my face before letting it drop back over my arm. I'm afraid what she found there, but she seems more concerned at the way some of her eyeliners crusted at the corner of one eye._ _

__God, when do I see her in the light anymore?_ _

__I’m leaning away, trying to ease us apart without much trouble, trying not to give a wrong impression when I’m pushing her hair away, trying _not_ to pay attention to the confusion that grows there as I study her for a second, wondering. Her mouth opens at the same time I move my hand, but nothing comes out._ _

__I never really was able to look so closely, understand her freckles, how they pool around the bridge of her nose and forehead, but now I do. And I realize how pale they are, only barely visible. Seriously?_ _

__“You’re ridiculous.” I’m laughing suddenly and probably too loudly, and don’t pay mind to the daggers burying themselves into my face as I give no warning before wiping my thumb around the bridge of her nose again, and again, ignoring the look, how after a few times it’s less threatening and I’m lowering my hand from what could be entire constellations, hidden from a fucking astronomer at that._ _

__“Don’t question me.” Her frown is the intense one of someone straining not to break into a smile, words tight and rigid._ _

__“Would you not question me?” I can’t help falling for the falter in her stoicism, the diverting of her attention from my aggressive makeup removal to the rationalization._ _

__“That’s different.” She finally settles upon._ _

__Maybe if I had wanted reader to fall in love at the same time as I’ve been, it would make sense just about here to go on some long tirade about her. I will not. I do not care your opinion of her, or me, for that matter. I just really love her, even if she’s a wreck and a hypocrite._ _

__It is here that I end my assault on her insecurities, and I start to move away kind of gracelessly when she pulls me back in, presses her lips into my jawline, and I swear to god I start to melt right then and there._ _

__“Come to the ocean with me.” Her breath is warm on the side of my face, somehow refreshing at the same time. Makes me shiver in an odd way. “We’re close now, just a few hours.”_ _

__I can only nod my approval, startled by how she pushes me off almost immediately, starts to gather things together, fishing the keys off of the side table, calling back something about getting snacks before we go. I know I’d brought a change of clothes, but we kind of just brush our teeth, she calls home, we drop off the key and then fly down the freeway at sixty towards the ocean where I hope we’ll realize all our lives we’ve been selkies and decide to dive in headfirst and never return to the surface._ _

__Four hours is how long it takes to catch something other than more grass on the horizon,and I point it out with a bit too much excitement as she puts on the Smiths and an equally melancholic yet lighthearted smirk._ _

__I remember a trip I took to the beach with my parents years ago, to one of those big commercial vacation beaches, the kind with no five square feet left unoccupied and a dull plastic glow off the clusters of families and their clashing blankets and umbrellas. This distant, sun-bleached memory is a far cry from what I’m satisfied to find us driving down through: a little off-road, no other cars to be seen. A little further down the road there are signs standing up over the crest of a hill, an ocean town, perhaps. I'm sure I have never been here. There's a kind of wistful charm about the undisturbed shoreline, natural and unadulterated and lonely. I wonder if it’s some kind of invasion to walk on it, for a human in all their corruption to upset something so pure, but I do it._ _

__“We made it.”_ _

__“It's kind of like the end of the world,” I hear behind me, as I’ve started to lose focus on all that exists beyond the hypnotizing rhythm of the waves. “or something.”_ _

__I bend down, find something grounding in sand that runs through my fingers, bits of debris, shell, things that might have come from thousands of miles away, here in my hand. Feel connected with the whole of the universe? Not until you're here._ _

__I'm sitting back on the hood of her car perhaps half an hour later, cleaning the grains of sand the best I can out of a shell, a curly kind of thing, like a soft serve ridged with brown and cream, then set it with the rest I've accumulated in a nest of my jacket. And she's only a few feet away, completely absorbed in something in a notebook, hand moving across the page in record speed, then freezing, then commencing at the same rapidity, her lips pressed together in concentration._ _

__I know i’d stay with her forever, you know, just in that time we sit like this, each absorbed in their own mind. I can feel all the blades of grass wind-moved around our little island, the sudden cool against a hot place on my thigh where my elbow has been resting. It’s humid, this ocean breeze slicing through the sweat and kind of cold and unbalanced._ _

__“Can I ask you something?”_ _

__She takes a second, dragging the pen slower now across the page to unhurriedly finish a sentence before looking up, one elbow pinning the notebook against her knees. I guess it takes me a second too, accustoming myself to the intent gaze, mossy green and all too familiar._ _

__“What would you think to remember, if this was really the end of the world?”_ _

__“A specific moment?” She hardly looks surprised, even with the little thought I put into the question myself. I wonder if this could be what I would remember, personally, is what brought it on._ _

__“Sure. Anything.”_ _

__“Okay.” I expect her to take a while, maybe even hours. “If we’re remembering specific moments I have…” She stops, as if trying to recall a specific number. “Plenty of those, but…”_ _

__“Really?”_ _

__“Well sure, I mean, life is such a rollercoaster it's hard to pinpoint any...singular thing, right?” I want to say I can pinpoint a singular thing or two myself, but that may as well add up to the briefness of my own existence. “Especially if you're trying to do it as the world is rushing to an end.”_ _

__“Maybe it’s subjective.” I say, instead, then after a moment, “Tell me?”_ _

__“About them?”_ _

__“Yeah.”_ _

__“Wow.”_ _

__The notebook goes off the the side, and I glance at it, noticing how she turns what she's been writing against the hood casually, leaving open a page filled with some diagram, no doubt a routine idea. She leans forward, fingertips coming together, and stares into the horizon._ _

__“I did something,” The start comes out rushed, and for a second it catches me off guard, and all I can manage to do is sit in silence. “Something really stupid, a long time ago.” It’s considered heavily before it comes out, a brief reminder slightly discomforting in it’s implications. “I guess I was younger than you.”_ _

__It’s a harmless sentence, anyways, and I get over it fast. Her words seem to drag out, and I linger on every one._ _

__“It wasn't just criminal, no, that was the least of my problems. I took it too far...and I… my family...they…” She shakes her head, leaves it off there. It’s so strange to see her at a complete loss of words. “You know, at first it wasn’t such a big deal, I ran away and felt like I couldn't be happier, nothing was holding me back, not anymore, but then the guilt starts to get to you, and it’s all you can think about, and you need to fix it, somehow. And I couldn’t do it, not with everyone so dedicated to avoiding me.” I wait a few seconds before wondering what comes next._ _

__“And?”_ _

__“And nine years later, no warning, my mother shows up at the door, says she’s done with ignoring me, it’s not worth it. You can imagine what that’s like.”_ _

__“Hard to.”_ _

__“They’re not all like that, anyways, some are simpler. You could take, that story I told you about this,” She pulls her necklace out, starts to play with it again. “Or when I got accepted to a college even after my horrible transcript, or back to parts of my childhood, or any of my children. It’s hard to find a best out of all of that. With so much low points, confused points, whatever, there’s a statistical ton of high points, too.”_ _

__“Wow.” It’s the kind of word best accompanied by a nervous laugh, but I can’t manage it._ _

__“Huan just found out he can transfer schools. He was ecstatic. I didn’t know, in that moment, if he was ever happier.”_ _

__I don’t bother pretending not to know what she’s talking about._ _

___“And you? Best moment of your life.”_  
“This.” I reach in my pocket where i’ve gotten so used to finding it, and hold it out.  
Her eyes get wider. “When I took this.” 

__I'm expecting something of a response deeper than what she eventually says, but maybe that's what makes me laugh, how she retains the serious look._ _

__“Kuvira, our lives are a fucking mess.”_ _

__The sun is setting when she finally looks at me, over the windshield and turns the music down, knowing I can already tell what she’s about to say as I force the pen back into the spiral of her book. So maybe I took it over._ _

__“Hopefully we still have enough gas to get to a motel.” I notice she turns back, the way we came, and I know that she plans on taking us back, but I don’t say anything about it._ _

__“Do you keep any in the back?”_ _

__“Yeah. Still hope it’s enough.”_ _

__The drive back is quiet, overrun by the sounds of the radio still turned down low, a warm afterthought to every word we exchange. I ask if we're heading back tomorrow, she says yes. I say I think I'm going to go back home anyways since I left a few CDs in my room and she says it's an excuse but doesn't say what to._ _

__At some point I move close enough to lean my head on her shoulder over the console, and she doesn't say anything. The song changes to one I've heard before._ _

__“This is fitting.” I get a look. “You know,” I end up only gesturing at the speakers, and _it's not my home it's their home and I'm welcome no more_ chimes in to agree._ _

__She hardly looks surprised, but even the gentle shake of her head, a bit of a forced laugh can't hide the sad look that comes out at the eyes. I can't bring myself to blame her, abandonment and vague suicidality and all that._ _

__I mouth along a few lyrics like that, slipping out of touch with anything but a quick succession of streetlamps out my window and the solidity of her shoulder against my cheek. _Such a heavenly way to die.__ _

__“Oh, I don't know, kind of a pointless way to die, when you think about it.”_ _

__“It's a bit of both, I think.”_ _

__We pull into motel number two’s parking lot one shoplifters of the world unite later. I have to move off of her, which is a bit disappointing since I am very tired and she's not a terrible pillow, but she insists a real bed will be better._ _

__There’s a tap on my window a few seconds later, indicating for me to lock the door. Then a few minutes silence, darkness, where I let my forehead roll against the window and watch her through the glass door. This motel isn’t as nice-looking as the one from last night, but there are beds, and shortly after she collapses on the nearest one to the door, I follow suit._ _

__I roll to get to the radio that sits forlorn on the nightstand a few seconds later, tuning it to the first promising station as I avoid watching her kind of change shirts but only make it halfway and end up just falling back on the mattress with a frustrated sound._ _

__For minute or two I just lay there, but I eventually convince myself to move, taking a second to just look. Until she looks back, that is._ _

__We both kind of trudge through showers and changing clothes and considering leaving one last time to pick up some food but deciding against it, all in near silence. And when finally I emerge from the bathroom and am left with the decision of which bed to go to she sticks her arms out towards me and I don't hesitate in accepting the invitation._ _

__This time, I fall asleep easy, but not for very long._ _

__I become aware of the emptiness beside me the second I hear a key in the lock. I don't know what time it is or how long it's been there but I don't get time to really wonder.  
The door opens cautiously, and it’s when I realize she’s not leaving but coming back that I sit upright, concerned._ _

__“I forgot to tell him I wasn’t coming back tonight.”_ _

__It doesn’t register at first, but I relax like a child without object temperance when she slips back under our blanket mountain, this time without any polite space._ _

__“Could've used the phone in here.”_ _

__I can feel her smile when I’ve shoved us together the second she’s back. Her chin brushes against my forehead, just barely._ _

__But she doesn’t fall asleep,and neither do I, trapped in some icy-blue prison, cool but never freezing over, always afraid to move, always afraid one is asleep and one isn’t and will wake them up. Sweat struggles to bathe the insides of my palms, fights against the chill from under the door. I lay there in the middle of this battle, slowly going out of my mind until I melt and slip out of the reaches of torture, shoving my face under her chin like a scared child, where they can’t reach me._ _

__“Can’t sleep either.”_ _

__“No.”_ _

__“You should, you know. We need to leave in the morning. It’s a long drive.”_ _

__I kiss her. You know, before I have a chance to tell myself not to._ _

__And when she kisses me back it’s candle flame hot. Hot like running a single finger through, wiping the soot stain off on the blanket, coming back, a sleepy, underwater sluggishness that turns into urgency as she pulls back and I, in some sudden burst of need, crush us back together with a hand on her neck, only wondering afterwards if I shouldn’t have - I half expect her to get up right there and reclaim the neglected bed across the room._ _

__'I'm sorry” _You're_ sorry? _ _

__She moves back, faces away from me. She does it so fast it hits me with another round nostalgia, but this time the fear that held such a grasp on me that night is dull. So her hand, sliding independent of herself across the space between us is easy to find, and a few seconds of quiet, undisturbed contact doesn't leave me with any familiar anxiety. I take another deep breath._ _

__“Su.”_ _

__“Mhmm.”_ _

__

__“'I don't know.” She turns and looks at me, nothing behind her tired gaze, still drifting ever so often to our awkward grasp on each other. And then, by some measure of that way she's looking at me and the confidence that came with a full day spent alone with her, I let slip the only thing I really could say, however wildly inappropriate. “I really just kind of want you.”_ _

__

__“Stop.” I'm so afraid, so afraid she's just going to move to the other bed, maybe even leave altogether, but at the same time I know she wouldn't. At the very least, I loosen my fingers, knowing she'll be letting go, but she doesn't. “Isn't that the whole point?”_ _

__“What?”_ _

__“You have me. That's why we left. So you know that I'm still here for you.”_ _

__“I didn't mean it that way.”_ _

__“'I know how you meant it.”_ _

__She does that throw yourself off a cliff kiss, quick like someone is watching, kind of like an incentive. And I imagine that's the end of that._ _

__It's not. Cause I have no courage to muster up. I just do it back. Again. Nothing to really think about except the way she looks at me like she's about to give some fake disappointed speech. I send a telepathic dare not to turn away again, which she takes me up on._ _

__The numbers on the radio a few feet away shine neon blue. I think it might be another one of those dreams, where I just kiss her again and there's nothing else to it but a brief, intense, ripping off of clothes followed by something really tired and soft and not requiring explanation._ _

__A little later, as were tangled in the blankets and each other and a bit of hopeless abandon, I get out an “I love you”, a harmless slip of the tongue at best case scenario. I love you. We’ve just run away, hid in a hotel room hundreds of miles away from home and lying with half our clothes on in a wrap of sheets with no second thought as to the consequences, and I love you._ _

__She makes a questionable sound that I nod back to in earnest._ _

__“Well it does put some reason to all this shit we’ve gotten ourselves into.”_ _

__“I guess so” We laugh again, in the least awkward way I guess, kind of simultaneously, her hand slipped under my arm curling and pulling skin across on my ribcage._ _

__I try to sink in a little deeper. Stretch my face up to hers, kiss her in those places where i’ve rubbed away makeup like clouding on glass, still accepting the tilt of her head that invites me back down, fingers digging softly into bare flesh._ _

__I wake up, the last thing in my mind being her hand against my ribcage, going down with my own hand as if, like some phantom limb, I might still feel it there. The space next to me is vacant, just one endless desert of rumpled sheet, cascading off suddenly at the end._ _

__I remember the sound that woke me up, don’t know what it was except it’s accompanying “shit” from across the room. Silence. Then -_ _

__“I know you’re awake.”_ _

__Turning over, I’m a bit surprised to find her back to me, bending over to retrieve the car keys off of the ground next to the undisturbed bed. She just looks back for a second, eyes flashing over, no hint of eye contact, then already taking hold of the doorknob._ _

__“I’ll be right back.”_ _

__“Where are you going?”_ _

__“Corner store across the street.” She sounds guilty for it. I think I know why, but I don't say anything about it. I just hope i’m wrong. “Do you want me to get you anything?”_ _

__“No.”_ _

__There’s a flash of sunlight, and sound, and then silence once again. I feel like I could have imagined the whole exchange, it went so fast._ _

__I hurt. It’s like I’ve slept all wrong, all of my limbs feel stiff and crack when I pull myself upright, like I’ve emerged from a metamorphosis. I'm not wearing any shirt. Shit, I'm not wearing close to anything._ _

__I don't think I've been dreaming._ _

__I can’t even think what I’m meant to do. Maybe get up, maybe...what next? I shouldn’t get up. I start checking for something, counting ribs, not knowing what I’m even looking for, a mark, maybe, anything to justify a time-consuming search. Maybe be able to feign sleep by the time she comes back,and then be able to wake up, unawares._ _

__I know what she's going to do. I know she thinks we took it too far, and she doesn't know how to deal with that, and for her sake...I have to be okay. Which isn’t a stretch - the only issue is this limbo. I feel caught in the crossroads, hanging in suspense. It’s polar opposites: elation, panic. I can overlook it, but it still clings on like a bacteria, dragging me backwards as I find the will to untangle myself from sheets, just enough to scoop up my shirt on the way to the bathroom, and finally run out just inside the doorway._ _

__The familiarity of my own reflection shocks me the second I catch sight of it. A little reminder of who exactly I am. Where I've been. And what exactly I'm doing._ _

__I feel, I don't know, bad. Not bad like...bad, bad, but kind of guilty. An unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach. Kind of sluttish, in the worse possible way. Just like I've done something really bad. Eloquent, I know. It's like a dream I'm not really forgetting, but not a bad one, just -_ _

__I sit under a slightly-flickering light, and go through all of this turmoil, not really moving, half-dressed, picking away the scab from a scratch on my thigh from a few days ago._ _

__You're being dramatic. It's your fault. You were the one who rushed into it. And she's probably off blaming herself _and probably smoking because of it -__ _

__Fuck._ _

__I time myself so I only come out after I’ve heard the door open and close, which isn’t overthinking my situation at all. I kind of avoid her eyes, still take the plastic bag she hands me and notice she doesn't smell enough like smoke to have been out for cigarettes. I allow myself a little breathing room as I follow her to where she sits back on the unused bed and start to unwrap a breakfast roll of shock tarts._ _

__She pulls a road map out of the bag next to her,unfolds it across the neatly made sheets between us, and starts to silently plan out our return without looking once at me. I shuffleboard slide a piece of candy across to her. She takes it. It's a small comfort._ _

__“So we didn't really take the optimal route here,” I follow her finger as it lands against the cluster of lines that make up a city. “I want to find a way around this, so we don't have to deal with traffic. Maybe cut down on a lot of time.” I nod, even though I can't see why it matters at all, pushing more of the candy out of the wrapper and onto the map, and starting to arrange them in a close rainbow sequence._ _

__“I didn't exactly bring a credit card or anything, and I don't know how much gas we can buy…” She trails away, finger having stopped a long time ago, and slowly bites her lip._ _

__“You regret it?” An elastic pause begins to drag out as our mobility comes back to us, eyes travel once again, the universe comes unfrozen. “In some sense of the word?”_ _

__There’s a kind of look I get that speaks surprise at the suddenness of it, but I can’t say I feel like being elaborate. It feels like a crime we’ve gotten out of, something unspeakably horrible…was it criminal? I don't even know._ _

__“...Guilt, at least?” I start to color code, green, blue sliding my finger across the paper in the hope that it might lead me away from panic, somehow. I’m hardly paying attention. Pink, purple._ _

__I look up once every color is in order, and realize she's been staring. I know how silence translates, at any rate._ _

__“Forget it happened?”_ _

__“I don’t mean that -” she starts, voice suddenly deprived of all it's emotionless construction, like releasing a held breath. I wonder how long she would have held it if I hadn't decided to bring it up._ _

__“- I know. It’s just better not to think about it, right?”_ _

__“I’m so sorry.”_ _

__“There’s nothing to be sorry about”_ _

__“Are you okay?”_ _

__“Aside from a weird sense of…crushing guilt. Perfect. Amazing, even.”_ _

__“Guilt?”_ _

__“I don't know, it's a subconscious thing. I'll figure it out.”_ _

__“Okay.”_ _

__It's okay. We leave about an hour later without looking back, and our Smiths collection runs out before we're out of town.  
She asks if she should have got coffee, I tell her it may not have been a bad idea._ _

__“You didn’t get any cigarettes, right?” I blurt out after a few minutes of driving, steadying gas station coffee in the cupholders as we make a turn._ _

__“Just now?”_ _

__“At all today.”_ _

__She denies slowly, sincere but with a hint of confusion. Probably expecting an explanation as opposed to another accusation._ _

__“I don’t make you want to smoke, did I?”_ _

__“Of course not.” She still has the habit of bringing her fingers to her face as if holding a phantom cigarette. “In the hold of a particularly wild and confusing, um, anxiety attack, I came very close to buying some, but that was all. It wasn't you. Did you think it was you?” I nod. “It wasn't.”_ _

__......... ... ... .. .. .. . . . . ._ _

__

__“Does it make you nervous, to go back there?” is the next thing she asks._ _

__“I feel like it should.” Now that I put some thought into it, it doesn't at all. I can’t really describe my emotions at returning to the lion’s den, like I can’t really trace each thought that whirls through my head. “You?”_ _

__“Oh, not at all. I think it’s more troubling how I... imagine you feel about it.”_ _

__“Really?”_ _

__“I know what’s waiting for me, at least. Justified disappointment, we’ve already talked about it, it’s nothing new.” It catches me off guard, that one phrase, and I come upright._ _

__“How much does he know?” She looks perfectly expectant of this question, unsurprised and somehow still silent, like she’s choosing not to say._ _

__“I can’t really...quantify that.”_ _

__“You tell him everything?” I identify this emotion. I identify it in a split second, and resolve to do nothing about it until it’s quickly pacified in the few seconds it takes for a slow response_ _

__“I have never repeated a single thing you have said to me.”_ _

__“I know.” It's the stress. Even though I claim not to be nervous, something definitely begins to bother me as the scenery becomes familiar around us. She notices, because at some point another hand slips into my jacket pocket and uncurls my own from its anxious fist._ _

__“You know you don't have to go back. To him, I mean.”_ _

__“I'll see it through.” What that means, I have no idea of. My nails may have bitten into the back of her hand a little too hard, so I release._ _

__Just don’t touch. It took me so long to figure out. That's what it was that made me feel so horrible this morning. Ingrained demonization of that sort of thing, all that. It was probably a religious upbringing issue. She thinks I may be right. And I guess the whole...abandonment thing didn't exactly help the case._ _

__I’m over it, though, at this point. Just took me a few hours._ _

__We cut off conversation altogether by the time were a few blocks away, and I'm letting go of her hand with the kind of reluctance you might see in someone off to war, return indefinite._ _

__“See you soon.”  
“How soon.” I say without really expecting an answer, since we both know tomorrow is a Monday. She starts to break into a laugh and I start to open the door, but I don't really make it._ _

__“Love you?”_ _

__I almost say, don’t do that, as if I’ve suddenly forgotten however many times i’ve done just that and not understood her frustration at it - even was angry at her for it. And suddenly I just, understand, right as I’m walking away, climbing up to my window, before I remember I did not leave through it the last time and it is definitely locked. I try to force it open, it won't go._ _

__I should have asked why she said it, more like, since when does she say that- but I remember, then, the last time. How it’s kind of...more criminal than sneaking kisses in the dark and meeting out in the middle of fucking nowhere. It just makes everything that much harder._ _

__I’m _fucked._ Absolutely fucked._ _

__I'm fucked and all I can really remember is the apology in those words._ _

__I know it's not dark, or even very close to getting dark, and honestly I should have taken the time to sneak in through the front door. Gone somewhere else. Waited. Anything but keep trying to open the window until the door opens directly in front of me and I nearly fall off the roof at the sight of him only ten feet away._ _

__He looks different. Cleaner, more self-aware. He looks at me like I'm a ghost, too, as the window is opened and I panic at his hand around my upper arm as he pulls me in._ _

__I stay stiff against the hug he pulls me into, so tight and kind of annoying as a little part of me worries about the hand in my hair and if it'll mess up the braid Su gave me at a now-distant rest area._ _

__He's repeating a lot of things, a mantra or maybe a sneaky incantation to never let me out of the house again._ _

__“Forgive me, forgive me, I love you, it'll be ok, I'm sorry, forgive me.”_ _

__And I to him, however I feel about this, “I know. I know.” And “I do.”_ _

__He's kind of crying._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what the heck i forgot how to code italics so instead of being normal and reteaching myself i just....stopped using them....
> 
> hey yall should like...follow me @ kuvirabbits.tumblr.com so you can hear me complain ever so often about this and sometmes yell about su i mean what more could you want
> 
> oh and im sorry for a lot of that ive kind of been having a rough time dealing with some junk an its kinda....coming out in this....oops
> 
> FUC K ALSO http://kuvirabbits.tumblr.com/post/154567033221/veroniquemagique-kuvirabbits  
> a while back this complete angel(cough) fuckinf drew them how i portray them here and im still not over it and everyone should just pay attention to her shes the best and shes been rly encouraging and wow
> 
> fuck
> 
> also i dont think nyone wants this but just putting it out there i have like a 2 hour playlist of all the music that inspires me for this and i listen to while writing.........yeah if youre interested....hit me up.....its a lot of shoegaze.........yeah
> 
> thanks fr reading i love you all i hope youre doing well please drink some water


	10. interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> my dad just called me to say "are you going to heaven"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey woah listen this isnt a real chapter and it doesnt make ny sense i jsut felt bad because......next chapter is still an embryo and i told myself id finish it before last tuesday  
> anyways if anyones still reading i really hope youre having a wonderful day and make sure youre eating cause i have not and i almost passed out this morning standing in the kitchen trying to boil a ramen

I wake up sometimes, in the middle of the night or the morning or in the middle of the day and the first thing in my head, it’s her. Not even in a good way, sometimes. More often than not it’s a remnant of some nightmare or something I can’t quite remember. That’s the funny part.

It still stands that I love her, even when I’m thinking about her like this. Like, when I do remember, they’re all usually the same thoughts. The realization, back behind that building where we kissed and heard the door open, or maybe before that, maybe when we were in the dressing room, and someone could have heard us and that’s _why_ everything happened. Why Mel hates me, probably Max too, why _he_ hates me, why I left with her and why I -

It was such a brief period of time that caused so much...anguish, I guess you would say. I didn’t see it happening, either - if anything, I thought we were fine. On the right track. With me almost an adult and soon to leave the city I hate, and probably still capable of coming back to see her, or her to go see me - I thought we were _golden._ And that’’s where I suppose I went wrong.

When I was in Mel’s house, and it was going through my head that she could have told him who it was I was with that night, I might have tore out more than just her cigarette from her fingers. I also felt like I could die, probably more than ever before. 

In some way, I feel like the responsibility is all mine...for everything. And it really is, if I think about it, I started this. And when it ended, I made it come back together again, I guilted her into everything, I - really fucked up. Multiple times. 

And this is the reality of it: if those mistakes did get out, I wouldn’t be the one getting the rap for them. I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. That tears me up. I wish I was capable of changing that, to maybe even just erase the whole thing from people’s memory. And maybe,in some circuitous way, Raina was right about me having a bit of a god complex.

It’s good that I know that. the god complex thing - It’s so good. I just wish I knew sooner, and knew how to better control it.

Another thing: that I was so terrified. I don’t think I’m scared, not often at least, of many things, but that, that was...it was strange, really. Maybe fear, itself, as a real thing, has left me alone most of my life, and perhaps I should be thankful for that if it weren’t for it’s recent appearance being so completely jarring.I was scared after that, even if I never addressed it. I was scared to leave, scared to go to Raina for help, scared of going away and scared of coming home again. There’s a chance I may always be afraid of motel rooms.

It’s beginning to rain, I realize, drops sliding down the angle of my still-open window, the air thick with that...way air starts to smell when it rains. I remember writing something, the night I left, and when I turn around I am greeted with a single piece of heavily-scribbled upon paper.

It’s very much about him. I hate you, I hate you. I won’t deal with it anymore. I don’t need you when I have - you get it. It’s fucking ridiculous. And it’s still on my desk, where he could have read it and used it as all sorts of incrimination. I crumple it up, throw it in no general direction, then decide it would be better off in the trash.

I never really thought I could come back, just like that. Hours after he opened the door to me scrambling through the window, letting his tears bleed all over the back of my shirt, I’m back again, alone. At peace. Although I do lock the door as quietly as possible when I do. And I lose the shirt like it’s become a leech.

You know, the window is still open, and I could still retreat the way I came. My bag is still packed. I don't. But I _could._ That’s the whole point, that I could, and that’s the security I cling to until the toll of the events of the past few days finally hits me and I crash harder than I used to on Saturday mornings after sneaking in. I feel a bit lightheaded, like I’ve gotten out of bed too fast, something about a change in perspective, perhaps. I’m very tired. I wonder if he noticed the letter. I also wonder if there’s any food in the house, and why the bed is so empty.

Eventually, the need for food overcomes my need to sleep, and after laying there staring at the ceiling for about thirty minutes debating which necessity of life is expendable in this situation, I’m back on the stairs, trying not to make any sound, and not doing too well a job. I guess it doesn’t matter, because I round the corner to the sight of someone sat back, planted like a sentry in front of the door, face expressionless, white in the dark and very much satisfied that I decided to come down.

We look at each other. I know, deep down, that the first thing out of my mouth should be something along the lines of “don’t worry, I just want some food.” something like that. I haven’t even done anything wrong and I feel like he’s caught me. “I’m not trying to leave again.”? No. Nothing. I feel like he knows everything, somehow. What I’ve done, who I’ve been with, the first person I think of when I wake up - everything I’ve ever said or thought that might make him angrier at me, he knows it.

“You’d better go back up those stairs.” He punctuates with a laugh. I’m sure he knows everything. 

He can’t know everything. He was just crying, and hugging me, and now I feel like he might kill me.

And here I am again, afraid. It kills me. It actually hurts.

I guess I should have seen it coming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im gonna go watch bill nye


End file.
